kinetic shift

New Blog

2010-05-21T17:28:00.001-06:00

Check out my new blog here: blog.kevindonaldson.me
Thanks for stopping by!

Entrepreneurship & Money

2007-08-05T20:42:00.000-06:00

If you are a regular reader, you may have noticed my posts have dropped off recently. This has a strong correlation to the birth of my second son! - Noah Patrick was born on July 9th 2007. (pictured here with me and my other son Hunter) For anyone with kids I am sure that says it all regarding free time, however once things settle a bit, I expect to get back into a more regular routine. Its not just about getting posts out - for me its about training my mind to think, and focus on different ways of doing things. This blog is my tool to do that.

Given that I thought I would share a couple of thoughts on entrepreneurship that came out in some discussions with two friends/mentors of mine on the topic of money recently. (paraphrased)

1. A regular job is about working hard to make money. Being an entrepreneur is about making your money work for you.
2. Entrepreneurship is a game. The goal is to stay challenged and have fun. Money is just a good way to keep score.

Here's to getting a full nights rest sometime soon!

Mental Broadband

2007-07-23T21:25:00.000-06:00

I really like good metaphors. Here is one from Tom Haskins comparing our minds to laptops and the internet, where our conscious mind is the laptop and the 24/7 internet is our unconscious mind.

Most conscious minds rarely access the unconscious mind for solutions, inspirations, and intuitions. They are like laptops that search their hard drive, but do not go online to search the Web. The unconscious mind can guide us into perfect timing so we are in the right place with the right idea in mind to make the right difference. If we ask, we can receive what we need to know, learn what we need to do next and change what we need to upgrade.

Very thought provoking. Many people in business only ever access their own hard drive. Entrepreneurs and innovators strive to get to this level of thinking, but struggle in getting there. Tom provides some ideas in his post on knowing when to access, but to me the hard part is knowing how to form the question to run the correct search? First, I believe it is about finding your creative place. Second, you need to surround yourself with others at work or outside of work who are also trying to get to this level of consciousness or are possibly already there. Third - give it some time to process. The unconscious is vast, and it will take time to draw some conclusions.

Innovation at the Intersection

2007-07-22T12:53:00.001-06:00

I have referred to the Medici Effect in a couple recent posts (here and here), and figured I should post a review/summary of the book. The term Medici comes from a banking family by that name in 15 century Florence Italy. This family and a few others began to sponsor creators from a vast array of fields, which caused people with wildly different skills to come to Florence. Their they found each other, learned from each other and broke down barriers between disciplines and cultures. Together they created a new world based on ideas generated, which became known as the Renaissance.

The author Frans Johansson, does an excellent job looking at intersection innovation and how it can be applied to todays innovators. For me the difference between a good book and a great book is how much it keeps me thinking after I put it down. This was one of those books. I kept a notebook with me as the concepts actually caused me to think about things differently generated new ideas on concepts I have been mulling around in my head.

Everything is connected in one way or another. The trick is seeing how these things connect and how to use it. It actually goes against the grain suggesting specialization in a given field is not the best way to produced breakthrough innovation. Field specialization will produce directional innovation. In many fields directional innovation is drying up. All the relevant variables have been combined. We actually have a great chance of achieving ground breaking innovating by not specializing in just a single field of study/work.

If you have two different fields (A, B) and each field has a number of variables to play with your innovation potential in each field is

Innovation potential of A= x1*x2*x3*xn
Innovation potential of B= y1*y2*y3*yn

If you take two different fields of study and combine all the possible variables, your innovation potential has grown dramatically. You now have A*B possible combinations many of which have likely never even been thought about together.

Its not that you can just know a little about many fields - you still need to have some level of depth, but the key is applying concepts from one field to another, and then another etc. How do you do this? Well the book has many suggestions, but one simple way is to begin exposing yourself to different industries. Possibly take a job in a new field, or minimally just studying across different fields and begin to draw parallels with your current specialty areas.

Once change you will see on this blog going forward is that I will begin injecting books into my reading list that will hopefully expose me to other ways of thinking, learning and fields with which I have less knowledge, even though it will likely have nothing to do with my current job or expertise. My current reading list will start to contain titles that don't typically blend with my standard business titles.

In the meantime, if you are looking to find new ways of stretching your thinking, pick this book up and read it. I guarantee it will spawn some creative thinking.

Failure and Innovation

2007-07-08T14:57:00.000-06:00

Failure in most companies is a bad word. Some more innovative companies have leaned that failure is part of innovation, but most of what people hear is fail quickly or don't repeat the same mistake which are both good things to keep in mind, but not the whole story. Entrepreneurs are acutely aware of the concept of failure, and it is often equivalent to a badge of honor in the startup community. What else should an innovator (company or person) keep in mind with respect to failures?

Frans Johansson in the Medici Effect says that mistakes and false starts are part of the process for making ideas happen in unknown spaces, and must be factored into the equation in three ways:

Try ideas that fail to find ideas that won't
So how do you create that type of environment?

Its not just enough to be accepting of failure, but output whether generating success or failure should be rewarded.
Failure to execute ideas is the greatest failure, and be punished
Be suspicious of low failure rates. Maybe not enough risk is being taken or people are hiding mistakes
Hire people who have made intelligent failures, and let others know about it

Reserve resources for trial and error
One thing to note about innovations in new directions are that many assumptions you make during development of the idea will be wrong. This is the primary reason why many internet startup companies in the late 90's failed. They thought they were going to get it right the first time. You need to keep an agile mindset in your team and company.

Be prepared to change your plan of execution
Give yourself the time for several attempts
Spend your money carefully and try and keep reserves for more than one try
Be extremely careful if your reputation or goodwill is riding on success the first try

Remain motivated
Probably the most important, but you must find ways to keep motivation high. Essentially you need to build passion in your business.

If intrinsic motivation is high, and we are passionate about what we are doing, creativity will be free flowing
People who are driven to perform do so based on internal drive - not external incentives. They want to do a good job.
People in new innovation spaces must believe that they will get the reward they deserve for their efforts, even though at the start no one really knows what the reward will be.

Clearly it is important in new innovation spaces that failure is expected, but if you are in this space, make sure it goes deeper than that. It must be supported with the appropriate culture and incentives, allong with appropriate expectations, planning, resources to have many 'do-overs' in order to find the right solution.

Using 'Free' To Grow Your Business

2007-07-06T12:38:00.000-06:00

There is a series of posts on techdirt (see list at the end of the linked article) that have culminated with a summary article about using the concept of free to grow your business.

The article raise two important points regarding the use of free in your business model. The first is that if done correctly, you can increase your market size greatly. The second is that if you don't, someone else will do it correctly, and your existing business model will be in serious trouble.

The author defines 4 steps that in theory can be applied to any market with respect to the economics of free. (The author admits that some markets might be more challenging than others)

Redefine your market based on the benefits.
Break the benefits down into scarce and infinite components.
Set the infinite components free, syndicate them, make them easy to get - all to increase the value of the scarce components.
Charge for the scarce components that are tied to the infinite components.

This sounds very straightforward, and I suggest you try it against your market or any market you have some familiarity with. I tried this with a few different markets and it was much more difficult than you might think. Probably the most difficult part for me was breaking down the benefits into infinite and scarce. In markets where the product is related to content, the concept of infinite is much easier to define.

For this post, I chose to try the post-secondary education market through this lens: (feel free to disagree or add on)

Redefine the market: The benefit is innovation potential
Break the benefits down: Infinite - course content, research results;Scarce - Field experts, facilities/equipment, thought diversity, idea diversity, degrees/certifications, talent pool
Set the infinite components free: Make research results publicly available to companies and possible users of the research, (but track who is looking at it). Make all course information materials, book lists etc available online. Include sample or all video lectures. This supports the redefined market/benefits.
Charge for the scarce components: Access to professors becomes more valuable, getting the certification and the schools reputation become more important, people who are serious about education will see higher value in that others who are there are serious about learning (while still allowing anyone with internet access to learn and see what the institution has to offer), getting the university to partner with a business to do R&D work (sponsorship).

Yes, I am sure you can shoot holes through the above idea or possibly have other ideas to make it better, but the point is to think about your business in a different light. The economics of free isn't just about giving away your product for free, but being smart about what can be given away and still be used to grow your business.

The Internet Technology Dip

2007-07-02T13:04:00.001-06:00

I just finished listening to The Dip by Seth Godin. A short and too-the-point read. It got me thinking about the technology dip that occurs with internet startups. This dip used to be very deep, and difficult to push through.

Tools and hardware were expensive, proprietary, and had very low interoperability. You had to have people with very speicalized skills in house to operate it. Now, tools have become democratized, they are cheap or free with the open source movement, there are many available API's and expertise can be found easily often in the form of online communities. Also, you can typically procure enough hardware to with a very low budget to get any project to market. The technology dip has been flattened.

This shows up of course in the market, with the explosion of startups that have anywhere from a small technical component to those focused solely on technology. Now basically anyone with half an idea and access to basic development skills (even self taught) can attempt to enter the market with an internet based product. The dip has been drastically flattened and easily passable producing many half-baked and me-too products. The barrier to quitting at least on the technology front has been drastically reduced.

As an internet startup, if you are planning on using technology to differentiate, you need to understand this change. If you want to be exceptional, you have to move to the next technology dip or dig new deeper technology dips to rise above the crowd. No longer can you throw together a basic e-commerce sight, social networking site, bookmarking tool, or video sharing site and call yourself an exceptional, stand out from the crowd business. Any good VC/angel will see through this as well.

Basic web apps become commodities extremely fast. You need to take your technology to the next level of intelligence creating or entering the next generation dip that your average weekend web programmer will not be able to climb out of forcing them to quit. You need to take existing tools and combine/evolve them into truly value added products that support a need that people are willing to pay for. How can you make your application smarter than every other offering out there? How can you create new innovation by combining business needs with technology?

The Intersection of Business and Technology

2007-06-26T12:33:00.000-06:00

At the intersection of business and technology, people often get very excited or tense, optimistic or worried, challenged (in a good way) or frustrated. Frans Johansson in The Medici Effect talks about intersection innovation - a place where two fields collide and divert along a new innovative path. The collision between business and technology has been a slow moving one over a very long period of time, but companies, are starting to realize, what many or most entrepreneurs already know - the endless number of new paths that can be taken when you start looking at these two areas together instead of separately. We are now at a point where one field can rarely exist for any length of time without the other.

John Hagel has now joined Deloitte & Touche USA LLP and will be heading up a new research center to focus on the business issues created at this intersection.

He poses a number of intriguing questions around this topic of business/technology interesection here with some thought provoking commentary that is worth a look by any reader interested in the topic of this blog.

Foundational

What if there is no equilibrium?
Can the firm survive as the action flows to the edges?
Are all ecosystems created equal?
If the world is so flat, why are spikes becoming more prominent?

Strategy

Is adaptation all there is?
Can we escape the Red Queen effect?
As “L curves” replace “Bell curves”, what are the most promising routes to the head?
We have a growing realization that stocks of knowledge are diminishing in value relative to flows of knowledge, but what is required for effective participation in the highest value flows of knowledge?
What are the opportunities for the bottom of the pyramid to attack the top?
How do we measure success when so many of the rules are changing?

Technology

When is self-organizing not enough?
How are pull platforms likely to evolve?
What is the next generation of IT architecture?

Being at this intersection is to me what makes these two fields interesting and exciting for some while scary and daunting to others. It is the combined knowledge of these two areas that is driving much of the disruptive innovation we see today in the new economy. Knowledge and innovating down one side without considering the other will not produced viable results that will be able to compete in the current and future marketplace.

New Economy Problems

2007-06-20T12:45:00.000-06:00

In 1973 H. J. Rittel and M. M. Webber came up with the idea of the 'Wicked Problem' as it related to social planning. The original definition of a wicked problem included 10 components, however Jeff Conklin later proposed 4 defining elements to wicked problems in 2003:

The problem is not understood until after formulation of a solution.
Stakeholders have radically different world views and different frames for understanding the problem.
Constraints and resources to solve the problem change over time.
The problem is never solved.

Although the concept started with social planning, and now more and more applies to computer science problems, I think it is now expanding well into other part of business. As business becomes more complex, there are more wicked problems. As business and technology become more intertwined, there are more wicked problems. At Balihoo we are in the vertical search business. Search is a perfect example of a business-technology wicked problem.

How do these types of problems impact conventional thinking?

- Defining goals & expectations becomes a problem
- Defining tests or methods to validate results becomes a problem
- Decision by consensus becomes difficult
- Results are no longer correct or incorrect, but better or worse
- Project time-lines are difficult to define

In addition to driving your traditional project managers crazy, it generally disrupts the framework around how business's determine progress. However, it is something that everyone in the new economy will have to adjust to. What wicked problems do you have, and what is your approach to solving them?

Work Life Balance

2007-06-18T12:50:00.000-06:00

This weekend I headed up after work on friday to the Sawtooth Mountains north of where I live with 3 others to climb a great route called the Chockstone couloir on a peak called Grand Mogul. It was a short trip, tiring but extremely satisfying, creating great memories. I get out as often as is feasible, but with a busy job, and a growing family its important to make your free time count.

Recently we have been having a lot of discussions about what our company values are and should be. Values are important no matter how big or small you are. Values create the guardrails by which you work, and make decisions, just like your personal values guide life decisions.

One of the values that many companies speak to and try to have is 'Work Life Balance'. I never really liked this term because of its ambiguity. It seems straight forward, but it isn't. Its the term balance that bothers me. Balance is in the eye of the beholder. What is balance to one person is imbalance to another. Balance implies evenness, but we all know that is never the case with any business in the new economy. Work effort volumes eb and flow like tides of the ocean, and just like weather patterns there are periods of calm as well as hurricanes. In my experience, I find that this term of 'Work Life Balance' is often a buzzword thrown in for appearances, with little thought to what it means, nor how different employees will perceive it. In the end most people are unhappy, because their perceptions of what it means is different from everyone else's.

We wanted something in the same vein as WLB inside our company, battering around terminology such as work life control, and others. We eventually settled on 'Work Life Passion'. Not a huge departure, but subtle enough. The term passion might almost be considered more ambiguous than balance, but to us it says better what the culture of our company is and what we want it to be as it grows. People need to be passionate about their work inside the office and their pursuits outside the office, and strike a balance that makes sense for the company as well as for them. It in no way implies a perfect 50/50 split, and thats ok.

Stowe Boyd often talks about the concept of flow, and your time being a shared space. In the new economy that is often the case. The line between work and home blurs for most, but for most that is better, allowing for a more full life (ie - going to your daughters school play mid day) Also with his definition of flow, time is not constance - it moves faster or slower based on situation. Think about when people talk about being in the zone with sports and time almost slows down as the ball approaches. This flow time is what passion is all about.

Time across work and life is never balanced, but with passion and good use of the time you have allows you to create the balance that is right for you.

Enterprise 2.0

2007-06-15T12:26:00.000-06:00

Enterprise 2.0 derives from Web 2.0, and refers to social software application that sit behind or are used behind the corporate firewall. Wikipedia has a good entry on the topic, and I just came across this slide deck about Enterprise 2.0 by Scott Gavin. It is very well done and told as a story, that may help you convey the concept in a more understandable way to peers in your organization. Have a look.

More True Than Ever Before

2007-06-14T06:59:00.000-06:00

Flipping through some old notes came across this quote. Even with all of our technology, I feel this is more true than ever before. Probably even more so because of technology.

"A business is best considered as a network of conversations"

- Gregory Bateson
Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972)

Photo Credit

Mapping Participation

2007-06-12T21:05:00.000-06:00

A while back I saw a post on Forester about a new article on a topic they called Social Technographics. It peaked my interest and they were offering copies to bloggers, who wanted to review, so I sent in a request. Never heard anything so I went through another source and got the paper anyway, and here is my summary of the key concepts:)

I always find it funny how the think-tanks come up with new terms, register them and then tell everyone how they were the first to come up with the idea. This time its 'Social Technographics' which essentially means describing a population based on their level of participation. Companies are starting to realize that demographics don't mean what they used to especially when it comes to online usage and especially social software. You can no longer equate race, sex or age to social software engagement. Forester suggests that you need to create a social strategy based on how your users map into a set of profiles. They have identified 6 increasing levels of participation. (note - participation levels are not mutually exclusive)

1. Creators: online consumers who publish blogs, maintain web pages, or upload videos at least once a month.
2. Critics: participate by either commenting on blogs, or posting ratings and reviews. Their participation is not near as intense as creators. Critics pick and choose where they offer their thoughts, and often use blogs or other items as a launch pad for their participation.
3. Collectors: save URL's, use social bookmarking, tagging, and RSS. They create meta data that shared with the entire community and add to the self organization of web content.
4. Joiners: one defining behavior - use of social networking sites. Highly likely to engage in other social software activities.
5. Spectators: read blogs, view videos, and listen to podcasts. The audience for the social content created by users in the other groups.
6. Inactives: do not participate in social computing activities. They site this as 52 percent which jives well with this study.

These profiles of course do vary by age. For example teenagers generate more content than any other generation, and joiners are dominated by Gen-Y. However age is not the only way to slice the data. User motivation (entertainment, career, family etc) as well as site features, and brand appeal can all drive different participation profiles.

The key with this is to think about these it terms of your users/customers to define the right strategy with respect to deploying social software. Make sure you deploy what will best fit the participation levels of your audience. Once you understand your audience, Forester continues that you should:

Map out how users will participate today and in the future
Create multiple participation points (don't just give your audience one option to participate)
Find lightweight ways for first time creators to contribute
Make it easy for spectators to find user generated content
Prepare your organization for participation (and criticism)

Overall, a decent article, I wouldn't say its worth the $280 for 12 pages of content, but if your organization has a contract with Forester its worth a read.

Look To The Inexeperience Curve

2007-06-11T22:59:00.000-06:00

With business audio books an important point needs to really stand out and catch you, because before you know it the reader is on to the next segment. This concept stood out for me the other day while listening to Maverics at Work.

As a leader probably one of the most important things you can do is to walk in stupid every day. You need to keep challenging the organization and yourself to seek out unexpected ideas, outside influences, and new perspectives on old problems. Every day something changes. Look to the inexperience curve. The more you know about something, the more important it is to challenge assumptions and habits that built your success in that area. This will help you think in a new light and drive innovation in your organization.

(By the way - don't confuse leader with manager - they are not related. You don't have to manage people to be a leader in your organization.)

Self Organizing Content

2007-06-10T15:03:00.000-06:00

I started looking into details of the Semantic Web about a year ago for a startup idea I was working on with a couple of friends. The concept on SW and the potential of it fascinates me. It is the web where data is stored in ways that machines can understand - not just humans. From Wikipedia:

Humans are capable of using the Web to carry out tasks such as finding the Finnish word for "car", to reserve a library book, or to search for the cheapest DVD and buy it. However, a computer cannot accomplish the same tasks without human direction because web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedium involved in finding, sharing and combining information on the web.

From a business perspective this offers massive potential for new waves of development and data analysis in new creative ways. (A good article by Business week on the topic) The interesting thing is that content on the web is already starting to self organize itself through tagging. Tagging doesn't just describe 'what' but many other aspects of the tagged object. This includes human associations that are key to understanding.

For example a take a picture of a cup on flickr which may be tagged with coffee, tea, both etc depending on different perspectives. The association between coffee and cup would not be obvious (especially to a machine!), but you can start to see with a world wide community of users tagging and creating associations, it starts to form the basis for content self-organization and association. This alone, does not create the semantic web, but begins to form the kernels in which to create one.

Tom Haskins refers to this concept in a different light, calling it reflection:

Those of us who search for, link to and tag digital content are practicing reflection...We are externalizing meaning. We are connecting our dots for others to consider how to connect their dots...We call it like we see it and that differs from everyone else. There are many right answers. There are thousands of ways to see it, frame it and use it. We have final say over our idiosyncratic consideration.

The next step beyond creating associations is to begin unearthing unknown or unlikely associations between concepts both inside and outside the walls of the organization. With the startup I was working on last year, part of what we were trying to do was have software help drive innovation, by 'understanding' disparate ideas created by people. By having software understand an idea, and then begin to draw associations between disparate ideas to create new streams of innovation.

Exciting times ahead, and we are all helping the web organize itself and realize the next evolution.

Do You Strive for Thought Leadership?

2007-06-06T06:18:00.000-06:00

I am currently listening to Maverics at Work by William Taylor and Polly LaBarre. This morning, just before getting out of the truck, they summed up the first section with 5 questions that I thought would be useful to pass on. They are centered around the concept of thought leadership, and propose that the only true form of market leadership is thought leadership.

5 questions to ask yourself today:

Do you have a distinctive and disruptive sense of purpose?
Do you have a vocabulary of competition that is unique to your industry and compelling to both employees and customers? (an 'only spoken here' vocabulary)
Are you prepared to reject opportunities that offer short term benefits but distract from the long term goal?
Can you be provocative without creating a backlash? (within your own organization or from competition)
If your company went out of business tomorrow who would really miss you and why?

Take some time to think about these questions in your business, and you might rethink some of your current business practices to put yourself in a thought leader position.

Your Business as a Tribe

2007-06-05T12:41:00.000-06:00

I have become much more interested in the social, cultural and behavioral impacts and changes deriving from web 2.0 and social software, much more than the technology itself. All those tools and features without any business model are reshaping our culture and the economy.

Stowe Boyd, one of the lead thinkers in this space gave a presentation at Reboot, about his concept on Flow. His presentation is available here. The clip is about 35 minutes long so take some time at your lunch and watch it.

Some of my key takeaways. This isn't by any means a summary of the talk but concepts that jumped out at me...

- First in first out processing works well at a supermarket, but not in an emergency room. We are now living in a world that is much more like an emergency room.
- We are actually moving to more of a pre-industrial/agricultural consciousness. More like that of a tribe.
- Today your time is a shared space, which conflicts with current business norms. Is what you are doing of greater benefit to you (or your boss) or does it benefit the tribe?
- The buddy list is the center of the universe. I am made greater by the sum of my connections & so are my connections.
- Productivity is second to connectivity. Network productivity trumps personal productivity

This type of thinking goes well beyond how, and what tool you should let in or look to utilize in your business to satisfy your customers, employees or give a boost to your search results or marketing campaign. Its about understanding how cultural norms are shifting and how you as a business will need to react. I like Stowe concept of the tribe, and although he used it in the context of your social network, I feel like this concept can be brought into an organizations, and supported by the right tools, will help support the productivity of the organizational tribe. The majority of companies are no longer living in a supermarket world (even if their business is supermarkets!). Business is now an emergency room.

Hierarchies Don't Work As Well As They Used To

2007-05-31T21:43:00.000-06:00

Hierarchies are tools that can used to categorize information into groups with logical 'parent-child' relationships. You see them everywhere, but the issue with them is that they are only one person's or one companies opinion of how the world looks. Companies use them extensively to describe their organizational structure, their process models, their product inventories, and this works great when everyone in the organization can be trained to fall into line and talk the same language.

However your customer doesn't always think in the same way as you. Their hierarchy may be different or most likely they don't think about a hiearchy at all! Second, not only are their new categories popping up all the time, but the lines are blurring between many categories. What once fell neatly into a well defined bucket, can produce hours of debate with no right answer.

The concept of folksonomies has become popular with the rise of Web 2.0. Folksonomies are user generated taxonomies or structured use to categorize content typically with the use of tags and tagging. Most people are familiar with tagging, but companies don't often see how this could or should be applied within an organization. However its not an all or northing decision. For example, it would be chaotic to organize your inventory internally through employee or customer created folksonomies (for the purpose of warehousing, ordering etc), but at the same time, why force your customers to try and figure our your archaic structure when they are trying to find a product to purchase? Yes search can help but customer driven folksonomies will help even more AND if tapped can also help search.

The thing is that most people in business today grew up in a world of parent child hierarchies. It has been ingrained in the way we think. Putting things into strict classifications helped us feel in control, but with the pace of change today, structures are quickly outdated and become very painful to re-organize. In our business we constantly fight with trying to classify advertising mediums, (ways in which you could advertise a product). It use to be simple - print, radio, television, direct mail and a few others captures almost everything. The fragmentation in this space is mind boggling now. How do you accurately categorize a blue tooth text messaging cell phone campaign? Or what about a direct mail campain via email. Is it an online offering or direct mail? Well its both but more importantly, it depends on who's doing the searching.

Even stretch your mind to think about internal classification structures. Since I have a background in process engineering, I know that people love to define and map out strict process hierarchies and 'teach' the rest of the organization how the business operates. But could processes be organized into employee created folksonomies to some degree? Process ownership and accountability is still required so its not about letting everyone decide separately how the organization runs itself, but the issue comes when people are trying to 'find' the details of a given process. (maybe for a new software application implementation) Do I find the 'employee onboarding process' under HR, under operations, under IT? (well it actually touches all three and more). Accountabilities aside, if tagging was was available and used, there would probably be a lot of time and argument saved by not having to create a hierarchy that meets everyones view of the world. And most importantly, the person who really needs the information, can find it.

The key point with this is to think about who your customers are (whether internal or external) and what they are trying to do with your information. The easier they can find, store and categorize in their terms, the more likely they will use your information assets in the future. How you categorize and use the data is completely different than how they see or want to use the data. Don't make it your customers problem to understand your structure.

Ideas for the Newspaper Industry

2007-05-29T12:23:00.000-06:00

A while ago, I posted about re-thinking the newspaper industry. Here are a couple of ideas I had around innovating in that space. I by no means have any background in this industry, but here goes. In my language customer is defined as a person who gathers utility from reading the contents of a newspaper.

Product Innovation: Allow readers to customize their content. This is not a new concept online. Personalized home pages, email alerts, RSS are all commonplace across the web, and if not already should be integrated into the online channel for the newspaper. This will not only help you better understand what your readers are interested, and allow for better targeted advertising, but will also make them better able to navigate the reams of content available.

Second, in the same vein - appreciate the fact that many of your users don't have an interest in online reading, however that doesn't mean that you should be able to provide them tailored content. Printing innovation is evolving rapidly. Why not allow a subscriber to tell you what they are interested in and have a customer newspaper printed for them based on these interests? Then urge them to go online and rate the content that was delivered so that future papers can further be tailored to their interests. (similar to what some companies are doing to tailor music streaming)

Beyond that I see digital newsstands that would allow a user to select from a menu, and have a custom paper printed off immediately on authentic newsprint (like a soda machine that spits out a newspaper). Plus advertising and print layout would be defined on the fly by software. Further - give people a plastic 'remember me' card, so that they can use with other electronic newsstands, of which get updated every time they make a change (similar to an ATM). Once this is attained - next step is partnering with other news organizations to share/combine content. (Give me the wall street journal combined with Boise local business in one paper!)

Business Model Innovation: Why not create a model where the price of the paper to the end customer varies based on how much advertising they are willing to accept. The more ads, the cheaper the paper becomes. It has been shown that people are willing to pay for advertising free niche content. Think pay-per-view or Sirius. This could initially be packages with varying levels of advertising along with various skews towards types of content (local, sports, business, etc) The content selection would then of course help associate related advertising.

Next combine the two ideas. Allow for infinite tailoring of content to what users need combined with business models that allow pricing to vary by customers interest or lack thereof for advertising, and have any advertising sent be targeted. Meet the long tail needs of your readership.

These may seem unrealistic (or maybe not), but in the end its about thinking on the edges. Most of what I talk about here requires technology and online interactions with consumers, but it doesn't rely solely on the online medium for content delivery.

Now when we get to a point where e-paper is almost as flexible as real paper (we are not that far off), that opens up entirely new opportunities.

Find Your "Creative Place"

2007-05-28T20:39:00.000-06:00

Where and when do you do your best creative thinking? Have you ever thought about it? What type of surroundings put your mind in an open state? A friend once told me that he even had creative 'seasons'. He found that spring was his most creative time of the year. Ben McConnell gets bursts of creativity in the shower, and he attributes it to higher ceilings. For quite some time while I traveled for work, my idea flow was very high on airplanes. Now of course if I am stuck in a middle seat near the back this isn't going to be the case, but more often then not, I get off an airplane with a lot of interesting notes scribbled down based on whatever I happened to be reading about. In this case it can't be the high ceilings, but maybe its looking out the windows? I have even written poetry in airplanes at different points, and believe me I am no poet:)

I do believe that the concept of bigger spaces creating better idea flow has merit. The feeling of openness and freedom somehow transfers to thought patterns, making them less constrained. The next logical question is how to create work environments that will allow the idea flow to increase. Since this will be different to different people, much of this will be tapping into your own sensations of creativity and working with it yourself. In contrast with most places I have worked at in the past, my current office environment is very creative for me. It does have high ceilings buts its more a feeling than any ability to articulate why it works. In addition to the ceilings, I think it's the traditional building materials (exposed brick and wood, and steel) that are part of it in addition to the open atmosphere. In contrast, I find new age materials do not stimulate idea flow, even when working in space age pod like set ups I have seen companies try and pull off. Everything seems too manufactured, and it doesn't matter how high the ceiling is.

Additionally, I need some connection to the outdoors. An ability to look out a window, and connect with the biggest open space of all. This of course isn't always feasible but not all your creative thinking needs to be in a designated work space between 8 & 5. Experiment and find different creative places for you. My front porch (view shown in picture) for instance has become a good idea flow space for me (at least when the weather is good). Open air, birds, wind chimes - not sure what it is, but its not really about the how. If it works, be aware of it, and use it.

What works for you?

Social Software - More Than Technology

2007-05-24T21:25:00.000-06:00

Came across a thought provoking essay by Danah Boyd about her take on the significance of Social Software. Its an intriguing read if you are interested in the significance of this concept beyond the tech aspects into more about how it is shaping and changing social behavior.

The article begins by giving an interesting history behind the concepts of social software/social computing and the various definitions. As is often the case, researchers and developers are unhappy with 'new' concepts and come out saying that 'they have always been there', however Danah makes a great point that Social software is about a movement, not simply a category of technologies. The author goes on to say:

It’s about recognizing that the era of e-commerce centered business models is over; we’ve moved on to web software that is all about letting people interact with people and data in a fluid way. It’s about recognizing that the web can be more than a broadcast channel; collections of user-generated content can have value. No matter what, it is indeed about the new but the new has nothing to do with technology; it has to do with attitude.

Danah argues that there are three dramatic changes that have been brought on by Social Software:

1. The way in which technologies are designed - The people behind these technologies are approaching design and deployment in fundamentally different ways. The key design values of the social software movement include:

Hack it up and get it out there
Learn from your users and evolve the system with them
Make your presence known to your users and invite them to provide feedback
When you make mistakes, grovel for forgiveness; your human too.

2. The way that participation spreads - Organic growth is at the heart of social software, but organic growth is not just a means of advertising - it is the primary means in which the culture of a site is formed. Values are built into social software, and spread through the networks of people who join.

3. The way people behave - Along with social software came a new way of building context. Unlike in early social technologies (usenet etc) that were about finding people with similar interests the current movement is about people first and topics second. It is far more about connecting to people and watching shared interests emerge through that. Context is no longer defined by the topic but by egocentric collections of people.

A few observations/thoughts that spring to mind:

On technology - I feel that some of this thinking could help bring traditional waterfall development at large organization out of the stone age. I am not talking about mission critical financial applications, but I think in general most 'internal' customers at companies would rather have in-house software on their desk sooner with a few bugs than wait much longer and realize that it wasn't what they really wanted in the first place.

On Participation - How does this aspect affect deployment of social software in business situations and/or B2B environments. I feel that social software can add tremendous value in the business world, but will competitive thinking stand it the way?

On Behavior- How will this movement impact company cultures as organizations begin to tread down the enterprise 2.0 path and experiment with social software. Will it work at all, given that the context for these applications is born in the consumer and social communities.

Act with Purpose

2007-05-23T06:18:00.000-06:00

Have you ever found yourself so busy that you fail to see the forest for the trees? That is, you are so busy doing 'tasks' that you forget why you are doing them? I think this can happen the best of people in any organization large or small. Due to constraints (financial, resource etc) small companies are less likely to do this or at least do it for long before they find themselves out of business, but I believe it is something that you need to remind yourself about every day. I found a quote the other day over at Found+Read that sums this up very well:

Don’t confuse activity for progress.

Time is precious. Act with purpose.

Its not enough to throw this out in a staff meeting, up as a quote on the wall or even as part of your company values unless you also live it every day. Remind yourself regularly, make it a part of what you do, and also part of how you speak. It will then spread to others and become rooted in your culture.

Many times, I believe that large companies could become less bloated, more efficient and effective if they could just embed this simple philosophy, not just as a statement inside their company walls, but as a strand into their cultural fiber.

(By the way a little plug for an item in my blogroll - Found+Read is a fairly new entrepreneurial blog that is a great resource for anything who falls in this category or wants to fall into this category. The other think I like about it, is that it is a blog with some social networking aspects build it - to me this model makes it more 'sticky' than other blogs in your feed list)

Sketching Ideas

2007-05-22T20:10:00.000-06:00

There is an article in Business Week that discusses a new book called Sketching User Experience, by Bill Buxton (Microsoft). Although I found the article to not be particularly meaty in terms of useful information, the concept of the book did ring true for me, coming from a background in business and system analysis and based on our current practices at Balihoo.

Inline with what Clayton Christenson describes in The Innovators Solution, Bill explains that companies are often very good at N+1 - enhancements to current products, but often do a very poor job at creating the next 'N'.

When designing new products people often jump straight into building prototypes, which are typically very detailed and can be very expensive. Sketching he says is the place to start:

Sketches, he argues, are quick, inexpensive, disposable, plentiful, offer minimal detail, and suggest and explore rather than confirm. (It should be noted that he doesn't limit "sketches" to pen on paper—a sketch might be digital or three-dimensional.) The value of sketching is less in the artifacts themselves than in the cognitive process of working through dozens of ideas, of considering as many options as possible, and allowing each option to raise new questions.

In our startup we use the concept of 'sketching' extensively to support rapid development.
With 3 week development sprints we create hand-drawn GUI prototypes in preparation for development planning as well as often real time on white boards during sprint planning sessions. A few great reasons to use hand drawn mock-ups:

They are very fast to develop and easy to re-create.
There is no need for expensive tools that people will spend excessive amounts of time and energy learning and making something look perfect that will likely be out of date in a couple days.
People inherently will provide less suggestions and feedback, the more 'professional' looking the mock up. Rough sketches will make people more open to suggesting changes.

If you do need to keep images in soft copy, use a digital camera and take pictures of white boards, or a scanner for paper mocks. (eg - we need to post images of these online to our offshore testing team). Its not just screens - we use sketching concepts to understand and designing new business processes, data relationships, and business models.

What does sketching do for us?

Articulate fuzzy concepts to others (fuzzy front end)
Provokes more conversation, challenges, questions, and exploration
Translates business ideas to developer better than the written equivalent
Developers feel more empowered to challenge, which ultimately helps create a better product

For this to work we:

Have a very high 'white board to usable wall space' ratio in the office
Use rapid development processes that do not allow for heavy design (focus on working code)
promote iterative thinking - Software is like sculpting. Each iteration chips away more of the rough edges. It doesn't have to be perfect the first time.

So what about a prototype? According to Buxton, if sketching is about asking questions, prototyping is about suggesting answers. I would say, let your product be your prototype, and let you customers suggest the answers. However sketching is the place to get you started and moving.

Recognizing Creativity

2007-05-18T13:00:00.000-06:00

Creativity is a great word but often hard to describe in a business sense and even harder to grow as an skill. Tom Haskins has a very thoughtful post that can help you identify creativity in yourself, and in doing so provides some great direction to help you grow your own creativity skills as well as those on your team or in your organization.

The key points:

If you're learning from this, you're being creative. Making sense of new information is creating links, frameworks or containers in your own mind.
If you wonder where creative ideas and inspired actions come from, you're being creative. With a picture of being open to receive what comes to you, you are in a frame of mind to get more creative.
If you're thinking this experience is like something else, you're being creative.
If you see learning happening to you, you're being creative.
If you're feeling fluid, you're being creative.
If you're moved by what shows up in your world, you're being creative.
If you're grateful for what you're given to say, see and think about, you're being creative.

Practice you creativity and help others improve their ability to be creative. Creativity will lead to ideas and ideas will lead to new ways to think about your business and how to be successful.

Thanks for a great post Tom. I read a lot of informative blog posts every day, but I love to find those 'golden nugget posts' that keep you thinking well beyond the point when you flip to your next RSS feed.

Rethinking The Newspaper Industry

2007-05-16T20:37:00.000-06:00

Yesterday, I was at a conference on the impacts of new media on marketing for the Capital City Communicators. One of the panel discussions centered around the changing interactions between marketers and journalists. What I found most profound after listening to the panel which included players from both sides - it was yet another example of how baffled, and stubborn most newspaper organizations are regarding the changes in the industry. These changes are rocking the foundation of a business model that is well over 100 years old. They simply have no clue on how to turn things around, so here are 10 thoughts I had after chewing on this issue for a day. I am not a journalist (at least in the mind of a journalist) but maybe that’s a good thing! Its always easier to think on the edges, when you are not trying to defend the status quo.

The internet (and other new media) is not just another channel to pipe the exact same print content. Newspaper organizations need to take full advantage of the this channel's ability to provide richer interaction to provide the customer a unique experience will make it valuable and something that can either supplement or provide an alternative to traditional print media.
Traditional print was a time of scarcity (of space). Now, scarcity is no longer an issue. With new media you have the ability to make anything available – not just what you think is important. The New York Times tag line has always been ‘All the news that’s fit to print’. Remove this elitist mentality from your thinking.
Print is no longer effective for breaking news. It’s a time-to-market issue.
Satisfy the long tail of news readers. Editors shouldn’t be choosing the content – they need to figure out ways for their customers to help them, and better yet – figure out ways to create unique content for all users.
Use your online channel to better understand customer needs.
Every piece of news is news to someone.
People will pay for things that they see value in. If given the exact same content across two channels, but one was free, would you pay?
Journalists should stop thinking of themselves as only news breakers or news creators. I believe the future is in aggregation. Aggregation of information, diverse opinions, providing local perspectives etc.
Don’t just think about readers as customers in your business model – think of them as potential suppliers. Think about the full business ecosystem of a newspaper organization in the new economy.
You can only have one primary customer. Think hard about who it is, and who it should be in the new economy. Readers? Advertiser? What business models will work based on this perspective?

All well and good to provide this type of commentary as an outsider right, but in a future post I will describe a couple of business ideas I came up with that might help bring a traditional newspaper business over the hump.

Blogging is a Commodity

2007-05-14T12:34:00.000-06:00

David Armano posted some thoughts from a presentation he did this past weekend about his experience and learnings with blogging. (Jason Alba took notes as well) Although blogging as a topic is discussed a lot, people are still learning, culture is shifting and there were definitely a few interesting insights he brought up:

You are not 'a Blogger' - you are a person who has something interesting to say. Blogging is a commodity, and anyone can do it. Calling yourself a blogger takes away from what makes you unique. Your talents, passion and personality does.

He discusses this concept and how it relates to your personal/corporate brand. Does your blog represent your extend your brand? Are you writing about what you are interested in or what you think others will be interested in. Are you creating content unique to you with your perspective or recycling content that others have created?

The interesting thing is that these concepts apply not matter if you are a single person with something to say, a sole proprietor of a business, a small business or a large corporation. The key with blogging is to be yourself. This is always so much easier than trying to be someone else anyway.

Allow Users to Experience Magic

2007-05-09T12:30:00.000-06:00

At our weekly business breakfast meeting, we had a new member - a seasoned entrepreneur who provided some great insights to our discussions. While telling us a little about himself - he described how a number of years ago he started following a childhood dream of being able to fly his own plane and got his pilots license. He made a great comment (I am paraphrasing):

"Sometimes I get nervous about when people ask me about what type of engine I have in my plane. To be honest, I don't know, and don't really care. Flying is not about the technology, its that magical feeling of leaving the ground."

This comment made me think about how companies should view their products/services. Its not about whats under the hood but the customer need that it is satisfying (basic utility, emotional needs, social needs etc) Some will want to know and see whats inside, but most just want to make their lives, job, task better through its usage. Think about how you can make a product that allows your customer to experience the 'magic of leaving the ground'.

The Reputation Economy

2007-05-08T14:22:00.000-06:00

I was at a conference recently where one of the presenters threw out some blogging statistics (unfortunately I don't have the source in my notes). 17% of companies currently are blogging. 35% expect to be blogging by the end of 2007 and 48% have no plans. Almost half of the companies out there have no plans to implement a simple (and almost free) means by which to start meaningful conversations with their customers.

A year ago many companies and executives still didn't even know what a blog was. Now it is unlikely that there is a CEO that doesn't know what one is, however the problem they are trying to figure out now is how to enter into this game without screwing up... and by the way screwing up means different things depending on who you are talking to - Peers, shareholders, investors, customers, industry experts, and other bloggers. Unfortunately it seems that most are just planning to ignore it.

What companies need to understand is that we are now truly in the reputation economy. Of course having a good reputation has always been important, but in the past companies had some means of controlling reputation perception through PR and advertising. Additionally, the mechanisms by which reputation spread was somewhat limited. You may have a good or bad reputation in your town, but move out from there and its like starting over (which could be either a positive or negative depending on the company).

Its similar to the ebola virus. It has always been around, but if it hit a small village it might wipe out the town the it could only spread that far since there were little to no connections outside of the town. Then towns became closer together, and faster means of transportation got developed, and the virus now pops up in many different places and everyone gets in a panic about the new virus...Social software tools are the rapid transportation mechanisms that are allowing reputation virus's spread quickly, pop up in new areas and surprising consumers... and can no longer be contained.

And its not just blogs that determine your reputation now - A plethora of social tools are now going mainstream. Wiki's and social networks from the behemoth mainstream players to the growing population of niche social networks, are the places where your corporate reputation will be determined - not your PR engine.

What makes this entire situation more interesting is that not only are tools available for the market to define your reputation, but whatever they define will be recorded for eternity in search indexes.

So for the nearly 50 percent of companies that have no plans to blog (and presumable no plans to use any other social tools), ignoring the change is not going to solve the problem. The solution is to learn, participate, communicate, and learn some more. Above all be humble.

The Right Channels to Your Customer

2007-05-07T12:36:00.000-06:00

The Pew Internet & American Life project has published a new study about the growing digital divide across America. According to John B Horrigan, 31% of America fit into the Elite tech user category, but almost half (49%) fall into the category of 'few Tech Assets'. So for all the hype about Web 2.0, many still do not use it or even care to use it.

Obviously age and other demographic differences play into how people slot into the different groups, but still, in an age where internet advertising is growing rapidly, are companies leaving a large portion of their consumers on the advertising table? There are more channels than every before to reach consumers. As a business, its important to not just follow the hype about internet growth. Be sure you understand who your customers are and how you can best reach them. Second - treat this as an opportunity do draw these customers into a meaningful conversation through new media channels. If they see value in using more interactive channels provided through Web 2.0, they they will begin to use them.

Going Into the Wind

2007-05-03T21:02:00.000-06:00

A quote from Mark Cuban:

"If other people are coming to the same conclusion as I am, I think 'This is a business I shouldn't waste my time with'"

Maybe a little over the top, but something to think about. At the same time, don't ever be naive to think that you are the only one with your idea. There are other people with the same idea in their head right now. Its just a question of who has the desire and ability to get to market quickly with the right business model. (Notice I didn't say first to market).

Often, a little competition is good, and a sign of an emerging market. If you are the only one there, is there really a market? Industries with entrants are good. Ones with market leaders are bad. The great thing about the new economy is that ideas are now spawning not just new products and services but entirely new industries.

Going into the wind, and thinking on the edges is the place to start a great new business.

Continuing Evolution of Web 2.0

2007-05-02T16:06:00.000-06:00

In some respects the web 2.0 surge has been an amazing open market innovation incubator. It has allowed the market to innovate off in any direction and produce some very interesting products through easy access to open source tools and data offered up freely by large platform vendors through API's. Unfortunately, startups in this space are usually 'cool tools' pretending to be businesses with a revenue model that likely has little depth beyond advertising with Google ad-words.

John Hagel suggests that Web 2.0 is currently going through an evolution, and points out some important considerations for both the entrepreneurs as well as the the platform companies that are supporting these. For startups the days of having no ambition to build sustaining business models beyond a strategy of feeding off of others in hopes for a high priced buy out are quickly coming to an end.

John says that entrepreneurs in this space need to understand these shifts to combat the change in the environment:

First, you can accelerate the innovation in the services you offer so that you are constantly one or two (or more) steps ahead of those tempted to copy you. Second, you can find ways to use your service offerings to build trust-based relationships with your users, ideally with some powerful network effects that will make it very difficult for later entrants to pry these people away from your service. Ideally, these two approaches can be integrated by motivating your users to enhance your services themselves so that the more users you have the better your services become – the essence of Web 2.0.

In addition I feel its important to think about how the plethora of features can be combined, tweaked and used for real business application. Think enterprise 2.0. If there is a business application, there is revenue. Take wikis. They quickly evolved into a feasible tool across many business applications, and although you can still get them for free, there is revenue potential in not only the product but service and support. Even Twitter is in the early stages of evolving into a potential business tool.

In many cases the biggest barrier is not finding a use for these tools in business, but changing the perception of value within organizations. Consumers are more open to change and great proving grounds for concepts that can then be applied in business. The consumer landscape allows you to build and test a network before carrying it into the business world. It is interesting that business software used to drive consumer software, and now it is often the other direction.

Innovation Should Be Elegant

2007-04-27T12:53:00.000-06:00

The Elegant Solution is what Mathew May says companies should be after when they innovate based on his work over a 10 year period with Toyota. Simple is better. Elegant is best. There is an excellent executive summary of this book on ‘Change This’, if you want to get the key concepts, but I have summarized some of the items I felt where most influential. Also having worked at Toyota myself, I can attest to the forward thinking nature of this amazing company.

According to May, the elegant solution is one in which the optimal outcome is achieved with minimal expenditure of effort and expense. It is about value, not gadgetry, and it is about not losing site of the why behind the what.

Some other key thoughts to consider about elegant solutions:

People don’t want products and services. They want solutions to problems.
Elegant solutions embrace an overarching philosophy of doing far more with much less
An elegant solution is recognized by its juxtaposition of simplicity and power.

Toyota has 3 primary principals of innovation that drive toward elegant solutions:

Ingenuity in craft: Ingenuity means free thinker. Companies don’t innovate, people do. How have you changed the way you work in the past week?
Pursuit of Perfection: The pursuit of perfection is not focused on achieving perfection, its focused on chasing it. Imperfection drives innovation.
Fit with Society: “Great innovation is great in large part because of context. Context separates invention from innovation. Context is like the frame in art. If the canvas doesn’t fit the frame, the whole thing doesn’t quite work well."

10 Ways identified to put these principals into practice

Let Learning Lead: To what degree is experimentation built into your core work processes?
Learn to See: How well do you understand the problems your customers face?
Design for today: Focus on clear and present needs. If your idea became a reality today, how well would it do?
Think in pictures: What opportunities exist to use images and visual references?
Capture the intangible: How do you connect emotionally with your customers?
Leverage the limits: Innovation demands exploiting limits. Which goals will stimulate new thinking?
Master the Tension: How can you generate creative tension?
Run the Numbers: What patterns can be investigated to challenge convention?
Make Kaisen Mandatory: Continuous improvement always. How do you sustain a steady flow of ideas?
Keep it Lean: Complexity destroys value. What elements of complexity would you customers love for you to remove?

If you find this interesting, I encourage you to read the manifesto and or buy the book to look for applications in your organization.

Marketing is Social

2007-04-26T20:32:00.000-06:00

I was reading through a slide presentation posted by Stowe Boyd that he presented recently on social media . Although I didn't see/hear the actual presentation, one of the slides in the deck really jumped out at me, and I thought it would be worth posting here as we rethink the way business works in the new economy.
In essence, make marketing a social experience with your customers to build better, stronger relationships instead of focusing on how to sell them more of your product offering through gimics. In todays economy consumers have more choice than ever before. This choice coupled with decreased brand loyalty and ever faster comoditization will drive companies to become better listeners. Treating customers like partners through authentic interactions will create lasting relationships and company longevity.

Innovation and the Pace of Change

2007-04-25T12:47:00.000-06:00

The term futurist sometimes seems strange to me with the ever increasing pace of change. the future used to be about decades into the future, and now it may only be months or years. Futurist, Jim Carroll's often has thoughts on the future of future of business. He has recently listed 10 truths about the future of business, however given the pace of change, these are actually trends that you need to consider now!

(I have trimmed down some of Jim's commentary and added a bit of my own.)

It’s incredibly fast: Product life cycles are collapsing, and comoditization happens faster than ever.
It involves a huge adaptability gap: Change management will cease to be an topic for projects or workshops, but a constant reality.
It has a huge instantaneity: The average consumer scans 12 feet of shelf space per second. Most news becomes old hat within 36 hours of emerging. We live in the era of the rapid idea-cycle.
It hits you most when you don’t expect it: Every organization must deal with two realities: the rapid emergence of new technologies, the sudden adoption of old-hat ideas.
It's being defined by renegades: Industry expatriates are redefining and innovating through their own startups. See my post on thrill seekers.
It involves partnership: Think 'business ecosystems' - not just 'my' business.
It involves intensity: Running your business at video-game intensity. (Thanks Jim for the great metaphor!)
It’s bigger than you think: Don't just think inside the boundaries of your industry - be prepared for competition from companies that you had never thought would be in that space.
It involves innovation intensity: With rapid change, everyone in an organization must innovate. Innovation is no longer a responsibility for the few.
It comes from experiential capital: Learn and relearn. Corporate equity isn't just money: it's the cumulative experience and knowledge of the team.

After reading these, do not dwell on how they will impact your current business. It is much more prudent to simply being thinking about how and when you will shift your business model, strategy and processes to handle these. Turn them into opportunities instead of threats.

Twitter For Marketing

2007-04-24T14:23:00.000-06:00

On a previous post about Twitter, I stated that people would begin to come up with ways to utilize this tool for business purposes, and today I came across a post on the blog Influential Interactive Marketing discussing 4 interesting ways in which twitter could be used for marketing.

Capture the live pulse of an event
Deepen a static experience through live commentary
Facilitate collaborative watching
Add a new dimension to promotions

To me, rethinking the use of Twitter for specific applications such as these will help it move from being a passing fad into something that will provide enjoyment, community and business value.

Citizen Marketing

2007-04-19T20:43:00.000-06:00

The concept of citizen marketing is born out of a desire for connection and sharing coupled with the complete democratization of production tools, which has created an amateur culture according to Ben McConnell who spoke today at an annual entrepreneur week event called Kickstart, as part of his Citizen Marketers book tour. Overall it was an interesting and lively discussion on the changing face of marketing which has obviously been kept current as the tour has progressed due to the incorporation of recent events and videos.

After the book first came out talking about the 4 F categories of citizen marketers (Firecrackers, Filters, Fanatics and Facilitators), I sensed a likeness to the categories identified in the Tipping Point (Maven's, Connectors and Salesmen). I blogged about it here. Although the book is still on my 'to read' list, after today's talk I still feel these parallels are interesting and applicable.

Besides an interesting discussion on the 4F's a few other key learnings I took away from today's talk:

Build Word of Mouth marketing into the DNA of your business
You are your Google results
The importance of the 3 V's when you think about your customers - Voice, Vote, Vocation
Google is more than a Search Engine - It is a reputation management system
New media is now a picking grounds for traditional media to find stories, instead of the other way around.
Ben is a pillar of fashion with his cool shoes and sweet t-shirt:)

Thanks Ben for a great talk today and it was a pleasure to meet you in person. Good luck with the rest of the tour!

Cultural Markets

2007-04-17T20:37:00.000-06:00

I was forwarded an interesting article today from the New York Times on Cumulative Advantage in marketplace success. Its an interesting read about social influence on creation of 'hits'. It is based on a a study done that claims that reliable hit prediction is impossible, no matter how much you know.

Conventional marketing wisdom holds that predicting success in cultural markets is mostly a matter of anticipating the preferences of the millions of individual people who participate in them. From this common-sense observation, it follows that if the experts could only figure out what it was about, say, the music, songwriting and packaging of Norah Jones that appealed to so many fans, they ought to be able to replicate it at will. And indeed that’s pretty much what they try to do. That they fail so frequently implies either that they aren’t studying their own successes carefully enough or that they are not paying sufficiently close attention to the changing preferences of their audience.

The common-sense view, however, makes a big assumption: that when people make decisions about what they like, they do so independently of one another. But people almost never make decisions independently — in part because the world abounds with so many choices that we have little hope of ever finding what we want on our own; in part because we are never really sure what we want anyway; and in part because what we often want is not so much to experience the “best” of everything as it is to experience the same things as other people and thereby also experience the benefits of sharing.

The concepts discussed in this article have a very similar ring to the concept of social epidemics put forth by Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point, however, the interesting part about this study is how 'hit' outcome would never be the same if repeated due to changing conditions and the and the influence of the (cultural) market itself.

If markets not only reveal our preferences but also modify them, then the relation between what we want now and what we wanted before — or what we will want in the future — becomes deeply ambiguous.

For business's it doesn't mean we should stop trying to predict future results or measure information from the past, but it is important to be aware of cultural market effects and the relative impact on your product or service.

Change is Inevitable

2007-04-12T22:20:00.000-06:00

Amazing video entitled 'Shift happens' . This is why 'Kinetic shift' is is important. Shift the way you and your business move.

Stealth Disruptive Innovation

2007-04-11T12:51:00.000-06:00

Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor describes two types of innovation in their book "The innovators Solution": 'Sustaining Innovation' and 'Disruptive Innovation'.

Sustaining innovation is an innovation that brings to market a product or service that a company in the market could sell for higher margins to its best customers. In other words, sustaining innovation brings a better product into the market.

A disruptive innovation brings to market a product not as good as the products in the current market, and so it cannot be sold to the mainstream customers. But it is simple and it is more affordable. It takes root in an undemanding portion of the market, then improves from that simple beginning to intercept with the needs of customers in the mainstream later.

the authors contend that the odds overwhelmingly favor the incumbent leaders of the industry in battles of sustaining innovation, whereas the entrants have the upper hand for disruptive innovation.
(if you find this concept interesting, I recommend reading the book. You can also get a short overview in this interview with the author.)

As an entrepreneur this would naturally steer you towards creating disruptive innovations, because if you agree with the concepts in the book, you have a high likely of getting clobbered if you try and build a business with a sustaining innovation. The problem with focusing on disruptive innovations is that often entrepreneurs often miss the mark about what customers needed often due to a lack of knowledge of a particular business/industry or issues that customers face in that space. Obviously by having members of your team that have a background in that space will help (and it is unlikely you will get much credence/funding/support anyhow without industry knowledge on your team), but this still does not guarantee success.

However in some cases it might be possible to do both and this could be a very successful path. Going to market as sustaining innovation to build out the right feature set, and then ultimately turning to a disruptive model for growth. Takes whats happening in the housing market. Internet companies are creating all sorts of tools and services that are currently sustaining innovations for real-estate agents/companies. Solutions help agents post houses (information, pictures, movies), find houses faster and more efficiently for their clients, set up agreements between buyers and sellers etc. These solutions aren't perfect, however through usage the products are being refined, improved and integrated until ultimately a large majority of consumers will begin to wonder why they really need a real estate agent? (Early adopters already thing this) Now a sustaining innovation has become a disruptive innovation.

Often I think this happens somewhat by accident, but the creative entrant might be able to drive this path from the start, depending on the industry/space they are playing in. Industry, and more importantly how forward thinking the members of that industry are will impact greatly on the success of this strategy. If, however you can make it work, it will ensure an efficient focus of your resources on building/embedding the right product initially before shifting to a disruptive model for growth.

Delivery vs Discovery

2007-04-09T21:46:00.000-06:00

The past couple weeks have been difficult in terms of getting blog posts up:) I have a bunch of ideas queued up with handwritten notes etc, but not time to type them. One of my colleagues is in India visiting our offshore team, and so evenings are prime time for work discussions, leaving little time for blogging. However I have still been sifting through my feeds and came across this post by Tim Haskins on Content Discovery vs Delivery Systems.

He defines 7 key aspects of content discovery systems:

Content discoveries looks like solutions in the eyes of the customer
Content discoveries come at a perfect time
Content discoveries serve the context of the customer
Content discoveries get shared by the customers
Content discoveries involve an adventure
Content discoveries put emphasis on how the content is used
Content discoveries transform the customer's experience

Like all aspects of business we need to transition from archaic models where we deliver something 'to' a customer to ones where the customer drives the transaction, and ultimately is more satisfied with the result. Are you a delivery company or a discovery company?

When Information is Endless...

2007-04-05T21:15:00.000-06:00

A thought I had...

Advertising has much higher influence when there is no other way to gather information about a product or service. Finding information is no longer an issue in todays hyper-connected world, so where does that leave advertising?

How VC's Make Money

2007-04-03T21:46:00.000-06:00

For all the entrepreneurs out there. A magnificently simple quote on how VC's make money, from Peter Rip, General Partner at Cross Link Capital:

"VC's have always made money at finding the ideal point of friction between the Present and the Future. Profits accumulate in the gap between What Is and What Is Possible".

Brilliant!

This quote was made in reference to his view on the decline in Web 2.o investment. Its not that Web 2.0 companies and services aren't valuable, but that Web 2.0 is now "firmly in the category of What is".

Service Innovation?

2007-04-02T20:39:00.000-06:00

Business week has put out an article on concept being called Service Innovation. The general concept of service innovation isn't new, but now that there is a consortium of top tech companies (IBM, Cisco, Oracle etc) creating what will be know as the Service Research and Innovation Initiative. Jim Spohrer, the director of Service Research at IBM uses a classic example to describe this hidden and not widely recognized term:

"The average person knows the story of Thomas Edison, the inventor and innovator who came up with the light bulb. People don't tend to think of the related service innovations—getting light bulbs into houses and schools, setting prices for the electricity services to keep them lit. That's all service innovation."

Most people equate innovation with production innovation. There are in fact several categories, or ways to classify innovation, however, to me the concept of service innovation seems like just a specific type or slice of business model innovation. I read through the article and found more information about the consortium but not a lot on the title concept of the article, so I thought I would put some thought into it.

First reset your thinking on the concept of a business model. There are many definitions, and miss-uses for the term but the best description I have found is from Alex Osterwalder at Arvetica. There is also a great diagram. In short Alex defines a business model as:

A business model is a conceptual tool that contains a set of elements and their relationships and allows expressing the business logic of a specific firm. It is a description of the value a company offers to one or several segments of customers and of the architecture of the firm and its network of partners for creating, marketing, and delivering this value and relationship capital, to generate profitable and sustainable revenue streams.

Next, you need to understand what business model innovation is. Here is a nice short description of business model innovation from Business Innovation website.

In some cases the innovation rests not in the technology or product or service, but in the business model itself. Business model is a broad-stroke picture of how an innovative concept will create economic value for the ultimate user, for the firm and its shareholders and partners. It considers the infrastructure required to move the product/service to the market in a manner that it both easy and convenient for customers and profitable for the firm.

If you want to understand more about business model innovation, here are a couple more excellent (free) resources: Global CEO Study from IBM, Permanent Innovation e-book by Langdon Morris at Innovation Labs.

Where business model innovation focuses on many aspects across the entire value stream service innovation seems to focus in not only on specific components of the business model focused on delivering value to the companies customer. So is it yet another new concept - likely not, but is it important in the new economy? Definitely!

After thinking about how they (vaguely) described service innovation, I tried to think about experiences I have had in this space and came up with one while working at Toyota Financial Service.

For a period of time a few years back, I was part of a representative team in the early stages of what I would call a competitive consortium service innovation initiative. The official name for the initiative was/is Route One. It was a partnership agreement between financing arms of the top 4 auto manufacturers in North America. (GMAC, Ford Financial, Chrysler Financial and Toyota Financial Services). Think about this for a moment and you will understand the magnitude and difficulties with something like this. The goal was to create a single interface for auto dealerships to finance with not only the big 4 but with any other Financing agency that wanted to join. The dealer could send financing applications out to any participating members through a single interface. The system was to also interface with their internal/in-house dealer management systems, and also help manage the application all the way through contract once a financier was selected.

A great win for dealers but also for participating members. The founders of course split the cost of building the app. (much less than if they tried to build some or all of the components themselves), and would actually receive revenues from the application at a point when the initiative was revenue generating. All participating members would gain from having potential access to new financing deals, and financiers would be forced to compete based of service and finance offerings rather than forcing the dealers to choose upfront. Ultimately it would mean a better deal for the end customer.

To me this felt like a great example of service (and business model) innovation. I always find working through my own examples helps me evolve my thinking on a specific topic. I would be interested in hearing other examples of how readers felt they were involved with service innovation.

Why People Go Online

2007-03-30T21:57:00.000-06:00

With business today its important for you to understand how to understand and interact with your customers online. Stowe Boyde puts forth an interesting idea about why people are online:

People are online for discovery. It looks like its about things, but its not. They go to 'places', but really to find people. And below it all, they are involved with people to discover themselves.

This is not a high-minded philosophy pitch: it just practical. If you are trying to build social apps you have to understand that, even if the people using the apps think that they are merely trying to find new music, or better shoes, or the best extreme kayaking trip in Hawaii.

As more of the web moves toward this model, more power moves to the edge. Users want control, they want to make the rules, choose their terms, friends, networks. Only the players that understand this will succeed. People will find meaning from relationship with others, not by membership in organizations or groups.

Not a lot to add to this, but just something to think about as look to better utilize this channel more effectively. I also recommend watching the slide show, and the video presentation called Social = me first posted on the site where this concept is discussed.

Digital Outlook 2007

2007-03-25T16:13:00.000-06:00

Avenue A Razorfish released its 2007 Digital Outlook report. It was on the agenda for last weekend, but I decided to go climbing in the Idaho mountains. This weekend I finally got some free time to read through the report. If you haven't seen it yet, its definitely worth reading or skimming. It gives a great overview of where the digital media space is moving, how it has changed from last year and offers some interesting insights into the connection between digital media and culture.

Some of my key take-a-ways:

- In 2006 communities as a defined vertical spending group were up 69% year-over-year and 216% since 2004. Communities tied with Entertainment as the vertical with the largest share of billings. This does not surprise me since communities can be view as another form of entertainment and likely are taking away eyes that would be on the entertainment vertical.

- While many traditional media companies have made a significant push to extend their brands online, it remains an uphill struggle. I think this is due to the lack of consideration of the differences between the channels. The online channel is fundamentally different than current media channels, however companies are having trouble making this transition.

- Across all media channels, marketers face the difficult challenge of 'breaking through the clutter' as the scale of the media immersion in daily life exceeds all prior benchmarks. The sheer volume, variety and availability of media channels have resulting in cultural change. So to have consumer behaviors.. I like this comment because this is one of the issues we are trying to solve at Balihoo.

- There are six broad themes driving changes seen in media today: Personalization, Collaboration & Community, Visualization, Ubiquity, Immediacy, and Monetization. What strikes me about these themes is that all except for monetization are also key aspects of a cultural shift taking place.

- 2007 is going to be a year about sorting out how to monetize all the new media real-estate. Creating the right ad model for revenue - the right value to the advertiser, but also the right experience to the consumer, at the right price, and in the right format.

A Framework for assessing Emerging Channels

Audience and Reach: "Is there an opportunity to interact with a sliver of our target audience more deeply, or in a new way on this channel?"
Accountability: "Knowing that measurement abilities among emerging channels vary can bw learn something about our audience we don't typically get to see?"
Investment: "Since this channel is new, and hasn't yet reached critical mass what level of investment do we need to make to ensure our test will be a success?"
Risk: "Realizing the open nature of this channel carries with it risks, so how can I construct a responsible framework for testing and learning that allows me to reach my customers without damaging my brand?"

Key insights into user behavior and expectations for the next iteration of the Web

Human-computer interaction is about to get intense: intersection of biology, technology and media.
The network is ubiquitous: We are no longer computer specific - we just want on the network. User experience or a media campaign must be ubiquitous as well.
There is no middle: In every category traffic will flow to a few big players and a host of niche players. Playing the middle will get you squeezed.
The internet is where general interest goes to die: Niche is king. Long tail theory.
Information Seeking equals entertainment: Internet has created the reemergence of play in new ways.
Transparency is king: People see little difference between online and offline company identities. Talking with consumers is smarter than talking to them.
Social networking ascends to utilitarian status: social networking is moving from fun hobby to everyday utility, with the behavior increasingly embedded into the culture.
Lets stay friends: See also this article on the concept of friending.
Giving back is good
People are open to new forms of content distribution.
Blogs have yet to achieve media brand status: Currently genres are still more important than specific blogs.
More mobile phones, less talking: Mobile phone use will grow, but not for talking.

No matter what business you are in, and what your title, everyone has to be a marketer to some degree, and whether or not it is a full time role or just part time, the digital landscape and the trends taking place are important for everyone to understand in the new economy.

From Brand to Lovemark

2007-03-24T21:26:00.000-06:00

This concept has been around for some time, but I just found it, so I am sure that their are others out there like me. It is called Lovemarks and is what Kevin Roberts considered what happens beyond the brand.

•Lovemarks are built on Love and Respect.
•Lovemarks inspire Loyalty Beyond Reason.
•Lovemarks are owned by the people who love them, not by companies.
•Lovemarks aren’t just Irreplaceable. They are irresistible.
•Lovemarks can be everything that people care deeply about.
•Inspirational Consumers decide what’s a Lovemark

In the new economy as more people are taking control of content, and media the concept of lovemarks is something for every business to think about. As stated in Kevin's bullets above, its not something you can just put in the budget for this year, on on next quarters goal list. Its something you have to work at one customer at a time, but think about the payoff.

Digital Snacking

2007-03-20T21:11:00.000-06:00

I really like a good metaphor, especially ones where parallels can be drawn across many facets of the topic. The other day I found this post by David Armano that talks about the snacking type behaviour of people today with digital media. His post is an offshoot of an article in Wired called Manifesto for the new Age, however I like how he digs deeper into this idea of snacking discussing 3 aspects of snacking as it relates to consuming digital content:

1. Is snacking all day bad for us?
2. Do we have time for "full meals" anymore?
3. Are we sacrificing depth for breadth?

A great post and something to think about regardless of if you are the one snacking or the one offering the food to the customers. If we are becoming a snacking economy, as a business how does that impact the way you market, advertise, deliver content, and communicate with your customers? As David points out as in the real world its about finding/delivering healthy snacks that taste good.

As an aside, #3 got me thinking about my post yesterday on Twitter. Twitter becomes the ultimate bite sized snack. Whether good or bad, people are often sacrificing depth for breadth, but the question is will twitter turn out to be simply junk food or will it evolve into a very small but healthy snack if your taste so desires?

What's All The Twitter About?

2007-03-19T20:06:00.000-06:00

Over the past couple of months its seems that a day doesn't go by where I don't see a blog post about Twitter. Twitter is like a cross between an online community and instant messaging. Tom Haskins even thinks it could become a degenerate form of blogging. I am always interested in new tools, but this one doesn't really call out to me like it has to the fast growing user base that the tool is enjoying. I started to think about why that is, and to me it does not help me with productivity, learning or building relationships.

I tend to look for tools that can increase my productivity, my ability to filter and read content, to reach out to colleagues and people that share common interests. Twitter on the other hand seems to be a de-productivity tool. Not only is it filled primarily with useless babble about what people are doing or not doing, but if I did it myself, it would reduce the amount of time I could be spending actually doing the activity that I would be twittering about. The once interesting thing about it is that you realize that the majority of the people using it lead fairly mundane, if not boring lives. Take a look at twitter vision and you will see what I mean. People doing really fun and exciting stuff aren't bothering to twitter about it. The WSJ has an interesting article (free) about how twitter is overwhelming some users.

I also thought about twitter as a communication substitute for conversation and the types of people that would find this tool great to have. It is called a connectivity tool, but I think it gives people a false sense of connectedness. On one side, I think it comes down to how extroverted or introverted you are in determining if you would find the tool useful. If you are a social butterfly, like to hear yourself talk, and like to know that there is someone/anyone out there for you to converse with, then this tool is for you. The father you go down the spectrum towards introvert, you are likely to find that this tool serves absolutely no purpose.

On the other side, a second plane that Twitter operates on is the meaningful relationship plane. It you are fine with having extremely shallow relationships than twitter is the tool for you. Twitter scares Kathy Sierra. She likens it to slot machine addictions, where it is a near-perfect example of the psychological principle of intermittent variable reward. I tend to agree. How much of an online addict are you when you start twittering that you are eating French fries for lunch, and tell anyone out there listening that you are off to bed. Go out and have coffee with a person face to face. It will be much more rewarding. Yes, you can't multi-task as easily but that the point. Twitter puts the 'superficial' in relationships.

So maybe I don't see value in the tool as it currently stands, but that's fine. If the many who do use it find enjoyment out of it, then it serves a purpose. Hopefully once the initial buzz dies down that people will begin to find some real business applications for the technology. CC Chapman has listed what he thinks are some possible uses. I am sure there will be others.

Thrill Seekers & Company Culture

2007-03-16T11:53:00.000-06:00

Seth Godin writes that there are basically two types of employees.

1. Thrill Seekers love growth. They most enjoy a day where they try something that was difficult, or--even better--said to be impossible, and then pull it off.
2. Fear avoiders hate change. They want the world to stay just the way it is. They're happy being mediocre, because being mediocre means less threat/fear/change.

Of course there is a lot of variation in people along a spectrum from one side to the other, however it is the people on the thrill seeking side of the fence that will prosper in the new economy.

So why should Companies think about this?
> Thrill seekers will naturally migrate to smaller companies and startups. Small companies and startups are a natural fit for this type of individual. They often start in, or try large companies, but thrill seekers cannot be happy for long in most large companies today because the company culture is predominantly Fear avoidance. They will get frustrated and leave.
> Thrill seekers will avoid places where unions and/or union mentality exist. Unions and union mentality shops are a breeding ground for fear avoidance.
> Thrill seekers attract each other. Whether purposefully or unknowingly, they seek out individual within their company or colleagues that feed their fire. In an era of online communities this becomes even easier.

What can companies do?:
> Understand where your employees fall on the spectrum and seek to help thrill seekers feed their needs, and funnel their energy to growing the company.
> Create a startup culture in your team, division or company, that will help move people to the thrill seeker side of the fence. Some will move faster than others, but the key is that you actively engaging with them.
> Build opportunities for thrill seekers across your company to meet, and use their creative forces to help drive change in your organization through cross functional teams, that allow them to drive the discussion.

What do you think?

Next Generation CIO

2007-03-15T16:22:00.000-06:00

As part of a new report on Grooming the 2010 CIO from the Society for Information Management they have identified 7 key roles successful CIO's assume in the enterprise today.

Utility Provider
Information Steward
Educator
Integrator
Relationship Architect
Strategist
Leader

In addition to the above roles, I believe that there are mental aspects to CIO success:

Think like a child (Creativity)
Stay Malleable (Flexibility)
Act Like a Startup (everything from how you budget, find and allocate resources, to keeping a laser like focus on milestones)

Different Perspective On Information Overload

2007-03-13T21:37:00.000-06:00

Everyone talks about information overload. There is more than enough information available. Its time and attention that are in short supply. I have been reading much more from Stowe Boyd recently and he discusses a few thoughts about the concept of information overload that will make you think. Probably my favorite quote on the subject:

How do jugglers juggle? They don't focus on the balls, the movements, or timing. They unfocus: it is a field of all three dimensions and their attention is distributed. Good jugglers can also sing or tell jokes while juggling. Unfocus.

He also talks about how we can think about Time as 'Flow Time':

Flow (Lived) time: we are in the unending moment through which everything flows -- Piaget and others have noted that time dilates: sometimes it goes fast, sometimes it zooms. When you are in the zone, the tennis (base, soccer, basket) ball seems to slow down and there is plenty of time to get into the right position, without consciously thinking of it.

Flow Strategies: (I like #3)

Time is a shared space -- your time is truly not your own
Productivity is second to Connection: network productivity trumps personal productivity
Everything important will find it’s way to you many, many times: don’t worry if you miss it
Remain in the flow: be wrapped up in the thing that has captured your attention

Some of the concepts Stowe presents are a little mind-bending. How do they reshape the way you think about business or even your own personal life?

Wisdom of Crowds - Web 2.0 Style

2007-03-12T19:24:00.000-06:00

Web 2.0 communities have generated some great buzz with respect to tapping into the wisdom of crowds. This attempt at a collaborative chapter by Joseph Jaffe on his next book written by his readers tries to draw wisdom from a crowd of individual thinkers (and then publish it). PicksPal is an example of the true wisdom of crowds in predictive markets. According to Tech Crunch PickPals overall record against the spread, has been 562 - 338 (a 63% win rate). Now they have a Web 2.0 March Madness Pool. Both are modern examples of community in action, but don't confuse the two. Only one shows the true wisdom of crowds. If you have not read The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, I highly recommend it. It will make you think about how this concept can be applied in your business.

Re-thinking Performance Metrics

2007-03-07T20:58:00.000-07:00

Last year due to the startup I was working on, I spent a lot of time trying to understand ROI - Return on Innovation. Its one of those metrics where the companies that have this metric think they have it down, but is it really measuring what they want it to? Is number of filed patents or number of 'launched' products really a measure of your return on innovation?

Since then, I have spent a lot of time thinking about how metrics are changing and shifting in the new economy. What non traditional metrics could be used to better measure and drive performance in an organization? I think one of the issues with most traditional metrics or even the various definitions of newer metrics such as return on innovation is that they tend to ignore the people factor - your customers and employees.

John Hagel has created some great thoughts for new performance metrics including Return on Attention (ROA), and Return on Information (yet another ROI). His most recent thinking is around ROS - Return on Skills or more accurately Return on Talent:

For me, talent is ultimately about the ability to deliver superior value through one’s activities, whether it is the janitor or the CEO. There are no caps to talent - no matter how good people are at what they do, there are infinite opportunities to deliver even more value. Talent is ultimately a function of human capital, intellectual capital, social capital and structural capital working together to amplify the value that can be delivered.

What other metrics could be explored? I think it would be interesting explore ROCS - Return on Customer Service, or ROA - Return on Authenticity. Next step - how to define and create measures to support these. What other types of metrics do you think could help drive performance in the new economy?

Example of Good Customer Service

2007-03-06T21:43:00.000-07:00

You always see blog posts where people complain about the bad service they have recieved, so I thought I would post a short example of some good customer service.

I subscribe to a magazine called Alpinist. It is probably one of the highest quality magazines I have seen in terms of photo and article quality. (Similar to LIFE magazine) The production quality is incredible. Its one of those magazines you don't throw away. I renew my subscription yearly and have been a loyal subscriber since the first issue almost 5 years ago. I usually renew once a year, and for the past few years they have offered a free calendar (also with exceptional photography) to entice the renewal, which of course I take advantage of.

The start of 2007 came and went with no calendar arriving. However I just received a package today. Yes, its now March but the package didn't contain the calendar 3 months late. There was a note that explained that the demand for the calendars how outstripped the supply and they were not able to send me one this year. However inside the packet was an Alpinist T-shirt along with notice that I would be receiving an extension on my subscription by two additional issues. 2 extra issues may not seem like a lot but consider this: The magazine is only published quarterly and the newstand price is $13 USD/issue. I felt like it was a pretty nice gesture.

Companies are starting to 'get it'. The ones who don't will slowly fade away.

The Long Tail of Social Networks

2007-02-28T08:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I received a post on Tech Crunch regarding a company called Ning, that now has now modified their tool for creating online social networks without any development knowledge. I created one myself in about 5 minutes and also sent the link around to a few at work. One of my colleagues also created one, and we started talking about what this means. A tool like this that any web-savvy user can create with, the long tail of social networks will start. They have as Chris Anderson stated 'democratized the tools of production'. No longer is one forced to mold into one of the big existing social networks. These now mainstream social networks have critical mass in terms of size but little to no focus, on anything besides creating large friend lists and an online communication portal. I have already stated that I think large social networks will reach a tipping point. Ning's tool will allow social networks to be created on any topic/interest that one can imagine. And just like the long tail has proven for niche content creation through blogging, I expect the same to happen here.

Of course these long tail social networks will not build memberships in the 10's of millions, but that is not their purpose. Their goal is not to compete against MySpace or Facebook. They offer what the mainstream social networks can't, due to their large size. They allow small focused groups to form, bond and socialize on specific topics of interest. Think about the potential for knowledge sharing and networking that could be done now. Personal blogs started two way conversations. Long tail social networks will create focused many-to-many conversations. They may become a natural extension of active blogs, where blogs test the waters to see if the conversation is worth having, and niche social networks extend these conversations. The long tail has proven that if one person has interest in a topic, there are others.

From an advertising perspective, long tail social networks could be an untapped goldmine. A few hundred eyes or possibly a few thousand eyes, that are part of a long tail social network that has a narrow focus, it likely more valuable than 100,000 eyes in a mainstream social network, where all you really know is that these people are social and they are likely under 30.

Growth in Never Static

2007-02-26T20:02:00.000-07:00

Something to think about: With your own personal growth and development you are either moving forward or moving back. There is not standing still. Which direction are you moving?

Always be moving forward. In our wired world today there is no excuse not to be.

Understanding Social Media

2007-02-25T19:57:00.000-07:00

Social media is often used to describe tools that are available for people to produce content and share it, but don't forget that the key word in this term is 'social'. Stowe Boyd has created a great summary of what social media is. His key tenants are:

1. Social media is not a broadcast medium
2. Social media is many to many
3. Social media is open
4. Social media is disruptive

Probably my favorite 'sum it up' quote is the following:
it is the way that we are organizing ourselves to communicate, to learn, and to understand the world and our place in it.

In business it is important to really understand this concept and how it can impact you in a positive or negative way. Media impacts everybody.

Personal Information Aggregation

2007-02-22T21:16:00.000-07:00

When the internet first came out the problem was finding what you wanted. Then search started to evolved, as more and more content came online in the form of web pages. Browser bookmarks became the tool of choice. Then at some point information overload started to occur and people wanted to find tools to find and filter. Search got better, RSS came on the scene, and a plethora of tools to help you sift through the growing information haystack came on the scene and continue to do so today. Tagging tools, feed readers, personalized home pages, widgets, etc etc. We are now at a point where we even need filters for our filters, or ways to collect and better assimilate out of our various filter points. I can't tell you how many times I am in a conversation, and I remember a an interesting topic I read recently, but cannot pinpoint where it was that I saw it - was it in my rss reader, as i scanned the backlog quickly, and if it was - what blog was it from... did i flag it, tag it and post to delicious? Was it an amazon review, or just something that somebody emailed to me?

At one point I had this idea for a personal web based data warehouse - a place in which you could store content, pointers and references, that could be categorized, tagged and it would work seamlessly across files on my hardrive as well as the web and accessible from any point, and it would 'learn' my interests and start looking for other items that match what interests me. It would also allow me to connect ideas to formulate new ideas.

To my knowledge this doesn't exist, but I have recently come across Google Notebook from Google Labs. I am finding it to be very useful at least for information aggregation. It gives me a tool to capture snippets from blog posts, websites or anything online and it brings the URL with it. You can create different notebooks which can be shared out, and within notebooks create different tabs, and its online, accessible any location and searchable with Google's powerful search engine. Yes its not perfect but its free and will likely evolve with more features. I quickly created a notebook for work related topics which I shared with a colleague. I also created a personal notebook with tabs including 'items I want to blog about', 'items that I find, but want to read later', etc. If you are looking for something new to try to help manage your information overload check it out, and let me know if you have found other useful information aggregation tools. (be aware - it doesn't work with the new IE 7)

Thinking on the Edges

2007-02-19T19:31:00.000-07:00

Thinking on the edges is finding that line between control and chaos, that can create breakthroughs for you and your business. I would suggest that it means even delving into chaos and pushing the line a little further and coming back to transform this into something that can be used effectively.

Growth can come from here, and as Karl Long suggests so does talent. As a job searcher, your online presence is now screened by any prudent employer so why not utilize this space to show your talents. I have stated before that a blog can be an extension to your resume.

If you are a company looking for talent don't just use Google to find dirt on candidates to screen them out (although this can be very effective), also think about using online sources for scouting talent. For example, if you are looking for .Net developers, don't just post on monster, Craig's List or other job boards - try looking on the edges for talent. Try using Google Blog Search or Technorati and look for bloggers with a passion for .Net development. Start by narrowing it to your city or region and then you can branch out from there. Depending on your business needs, you may also find candidates in YouTube or online communities.

There is so many more ways for people to show and present their talents beyond a resume and some references, but unfortunately they are very disparate and difficult if not impossible to link together. I feel like there is an opportunity here to build a talent scouting networking that can build informal resumes on candidates and match these to job opportunities through non linear connections. Keyword based filtering just doesn't cut it anymore. A startup idea I was working on in 2006 involved linking customers with ideas to companies that needed innovative ideas (that actually met customer needs). There are now a couple of startups now doing something very similar. Anyhow, one of the concepts we had was creating user innovation profiles. Among many uses of this concept was an application in the talent market where we could use these profiles to identify candidates that showed strong innovation potential in areas that companies were trying to find and hire for. An example of finding talent on the edges.

Online Existance

2007-02-18T22:04:00.000-07:00

This image from lynetter caught my eye and got me thinking about how this not only applies to individuals but also businesses. Existing online does not mean having a static web page. A tombstone is static content, but it doesn’t mean you will get any interaction. To be part of the new economy you need to exist in some way in the environment that is supporting it. This environment is the internet. It doesn’t really matter what your business is, communication and interaction has always been and will continue to be a cornerstone in any business. It’s not about having a MySpace page or having online chat support into your business – it’s about existing online in a way that makes sense for you and your customers.

Take it even one level higher… watch this amazing video I saw last weekend about how the web is changing our world, and how WE are the machine. (By the way if you like the background music it is a band called Deus and you can download the song for free)

It is one of those things that you will likely need to watch twice for it to start sinking in, and will change the way you view the online world. I have been thinking about it the entire week. People get so wrapped up in web minutia, and they either forget or don’t even see the bigger picture. This presentation offers what I feel is the 100,000 foot view of what is really going on with the web, and it should bring a smile to your face. Often we dwell on the negatives and miss-uses of the internet, but there is always bad with the good, and this will help you see the amazing forward trend that is taking place.

So exist online for yourself, for your business, for your online community, and support the interaction, growth, and sharing of knowledge in this world.

Slow Down

2007-02-16T09:53:00.000-07:00

As the pace of our lives get faster and faster, and information comes at us from every angle we sometimes forget that there is more to life than work, getting through the backlog of RSS feeds, making a dozen calls as you drive from here to there.... This morning as I was rushing to get ready for work, I looked out my front window and noticed that the sky was on fire. I could have just took a quick look and kept moving but I decided to go outside and enjoy the brief show of beauty. As I did this 5 deer came up out of the draw below our house and crossed about 50 ft in front of me, crossed the street and headed further up the hills. I knew then it was going to be a good day, and realized that it is worth it to slow down once in a while.

User Control Balanced With User Capability

2007-02-13T20:23:00.000-07:00

In the new economy it seems like giving users more and more control is the way to enrich the user experience. Although mostly applicable to software, I feel that this is happening in many business outside of software, but often users find out that more control isn't exactly what they need.

In our business we just started a new development sprint that includes the start of some new functionality that we have been hashing through for a few weeks now. Its not a technical problem but a business problem, where we are trying to build functionality meant to handle the needs of different types of users through a single model. The architecture to support the model wasn't near as difficult as trying to determine the most effective business model and whether or not the model would/will work for our customers since there are no existing frameworks in this space.

A post by Kathy Sierra entitled How Much Control Should Users Have sums up much of our more recent conversations along with efforts to strike a balance between over-engineering and flexibility to handle different user needs. Its a great post which I encourage you to read, but a key take away for me was the following summary statement:

So we should be trying to give users more capability and control...and encouraging them to take it. But we must balance that with the learning they need to take that responsibility without being overwhelmed.

Like everything else, it all comes back to user education. The more we help them learn and improve, the more control they can handle... and appreciate. By putting the user first, it's our job to give them the responsibility they want, but only when we know they're ready to handle it.

This is exactly what we are facing - this balance between building functionality that will enable them to feel empowered and control, but also not confuse the heck out of them when their first see it. In our case we have had numerous discussions about how to help ease users during their transition. Some of the items we came up with in a short brainstorming session were the following:

online help driven by user wants over forced usage (similar to how turbo tax works where they explain what a function will do, and then asks you if you need this, and want to know more)
interactive demo/help to walk them through actual business scenarios - not technical functions
building the application so that the user is not required to use the feature to get up and running.
have the application do some of the work by default until they are ready to take more control on their own.

Its not the results here that are important - its the practice of actively going through this exercise. I feel that the same type of exercise can and should be performed in all businesses - especially services based business. We often assume that the user is always right and/or wants full control over decisions, but there is a difference between being empowered and being in control. If they wanted full control they likely wouldn't not have hired you in the first place.

Think about your users and different needs they may have so that you can strike the right balance between control and capability, and how you can recognize traits associated with these needs to ensure the highest level of value to your user/customer.

The Franchise Model Is Not The Only Model For Growth

2007-02-10T20:54:00.000-07:00

I am currently about half way through The E Myth Revisited by Micheal Gerber. The book published in 1995 is considered a classic read for the entrepreneur, and while I have found many concepts in the book to be right on, I feel that others are showing their age and/or don't work as well in the new economy.

One of these items is his concept of the turn key revolution, and franchise model to grow your small business. In the (only) presented model the goal of course is to design repeatable processes and procedures for the lowest common denominator. Yes, this has worked well for companies like MacDonald's, but these concepts do not apply as well for business in the new economy. Yes, if you are trying to create and grow yet another fast food business, grow a carpet installation business or other manual labor based business this book will provide you some decent guidance, but unfortunately the running dialog with a woman who is trying to grow a pie baking business just doesn't ring home to me and likely any other entrepreneurs building thought/knowledge-based businesses.

Profitability does not have to mean growth in numbers, and being forced to build a business that can be executed by the lowest common denominator. Remember that small is the new big in the new economy and business model innovation is what is propelling the next wave of profitable companies. Think about ways you can grow without having to create a huge unskilled labor force following procedure manuals. You don't have to look at technology companies - think about successful companies such as Southwest Airlines. Yes, there are procedures, but the employees are taught to be entrepreneurial, and solve problems on the front lines that satisfy and create value for their customers. Even in our startup we selectively implement process and procedures in certain cases as we grow and depending on the skill of the people doing the work, but the goal is not to build a turn key/franchise. It is to create efficiencies and build business value with the smallest team possible - not create a monotone business model that can be 'stamped'.

Seth Godin blogs about a concept he calls sheepwalking. I think of it as the lemming effect. If you hire people to just follow the procedures thats all you get. If that is all it takes for your business to be successful, great, but in the new economy I would like to find a company starting up that will be successful with this model. Compliance doesn't alway create exceptional customer server and definitely does not create new innovative business value for your company. Gerber states that the franchise model is how you as a small business owner/entrepreneur get away from having to do the work yourself, but in times when innovation is what is driving successful companies and you have built a shop or franchises full of lemmings, ultimately you are still stuck in the driver seat forced to be the one that helps the business grow. No you aren't doing the physical work, but if everyone is taught to follow the manual, who is left to innovate to take the business to the next level?

Growth doesn't have to always come from adding bodies, and building to the lowest common denominator so you can expand a business of flat thinkers that follow the status quo. Look for rhythmic thinkers. Those that eb and flow with the melody of business. Those that don't get frazzled with a sudden change in tone or pitch, and quickly adjust if they fall out of key. Those that can beat to your drum, but also know how to adjust when the song changes.

Thinking Networks

2007-02-04T13:39:00.000-07:00

A lot of people join work related networks, but the majority of the time the intent is either to help find people that you may want to hire, or in the event that you are looking for work hopefully your search will be more fruitful and efficient. These are great reasons to have networks. Linkedin is a great online network, and most communities have networks to help meet and link up with other professionals. Many people also join what are often called 'leads groups' which are usually smaller, but are focused on helping find leads in whatever field you are in.

For over a year now, I have been part of a group that can probably be best described as a thought network. A small but diverse group of individuals that get together to discuss business related topics. We get together typically once a week for coffee/breakfast at 6:30AM. The agenda is rarely defined, and the group size changes week to week based on availability, but the discussions are always interesting ranging from someone asking for advice on terminating an under-performer, to business productivity tools to startup ideas to name a few. It is often referred to as the safe haven group - a place where you can be free to ask questions, and discuss topics as a peer group, where the intention is for everyone to learn and grow.

The great thing about the group, is that it is often self correcting. New people come in through existing members, but sometime with a misunderstanding of group's purpose or with different intentions. People that come in looking to sell business or find a job often stop coming after a while. When people come in with a self serving intentions they are often disappointed. Leads do happen in this group, but its all about the intention of the individuals. People build up trusting relationships with other members of the group through meaningful and well intended discussion to help each other.

Most people reading this belong to the more superficial work related networks but I urge you to think about trying to create a small thinking network. I was once told by a great management trainer: 'In your professional development, you are either moving forward or moving backwards. There is no standing still.' Business is changing so fast these days, it is crucial to create peer groups across different types of businesses and job types to assist with forward progression. This diversity, will help you grow professionally as well as personally in ways that simply cannot be done with people in the same company, same industry or profession. Also remember the key tenants of trust and caring. Its not just about who has the best ideas or solutions to problems - its about genuinely taking an interest in the development of others, and they in you.

The Myth of Market Share?

2007-01-24T21:25:00.000-07:00

J Scott Armstrong from the Wharton School of Business and co-author Kesten C Green have published a new study that discusses how too much focus on competition and gaining market share can harm profitability.

Sound management thinking has often stated that if a company must chase market share if they are to achieve greater profitability. Beating the competition is a common mindset in corporations. Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, famously stated that GE would not be in any business in which it could not be first or second in market share, and who would refute the success of Jack Welch?

Scott's work goes back as early as a study published in 96 which showed that for competitive-oriented objectives were negatively correlated with ROI. In other words he more managers tried to be the biggest in their market, the more they harmed their own profitability. Although the results of this study were criticized and ignored, they are now back with more research to back up the original claim. Plus there are now some very real world examples that have been very public which seem to back this claim...

Toyota:
Toyota is a profitable company and expects to build more vehicles than any other automaker in 2007, but grabbing market share is apparently not one of its goals. An Associated Press story on Toyota's imminent rise to the top described Kazuo Okamoto, executive vice president, as being "nonchalant" about Toyota's achievement. "We aren't that concerned about vehicle numbers," Okamoto told the AP. "But we are determined to go at it to develop cars that make a lot of people happy."

Nintendo:
In a December 4, 2006, article in The New Yorker by James Surowiecki, the magazine's business writer. Surowiecki describes how Sony, with its PlayStation 3, and Microsoft, maker of the Xbox 360, are beating each other's brains out trying to capture the biggest share of the video-game market. Meanwhile, third-place Nintendo, with its new game console called Wii (pronounced "wee"), has quietly become the most profitable game console company in Japan.

To me this has a lot to do with Blue Ocean Strategy and thinking. Focusing on the competition whether it be about the products you make or the services you offer is a red ocean strategy, and not optimal for success. This study appears to back this concept nicely. Focusing on competition and therefore existing market share puts you into a red ocean. Blue ocean strategy allows you to create new market share, so you don't have to think about the competition beyond determining the right new direction to follow. What do you think about the 'Myth of Market Share'?

Understandable & Effective Business Strategy

2007-01-22T20:17:00.000-07:00

Business strategy is often one of those things talked about in an executive office, but often not taken out to the organization (large or small). Whether it is so complex that only executives can understand it or the perception that is too complex to communicate by those developing it varies, however strategy works best when everyone is aware of it and understands it. Not everyone can or should participate in developing it, but execution works best when everyone is driving towards the strategic goal.

Even the term strategy congers up advanced diagrams, and complex thinking, that scares many in a company to leave it to the leaders in the organization. This is also wrong. Business strategy doesn't have to be complex.

Here is a simple model that can be used to communicate strategy to the organization that is simple but effective for both large and small organizations. Startups especially, can use this to help the team think about something beyond the current month or what will happen after the beta release. If you become a market leader in a new space, you still need to be thinking about the day when your differentiation will be copied or 'commoditized'.

The model works on the simple principal of always thinking ahead. Of course if you are a startup, you initially need to be focused on getting something to market. This required focus and some thinking about market segment targeting. However once you have went to market, there are 3 key curves in which you should be thinking about.

Defend and Extend: This is the hear and now. Many companies spend their entire effort in this curve, only to be surprised by the competition, and forced into a commodity market, which is a losing battle. Spend 60 % of your effort in this curve at any given time. This is your sweet spot and where the business makes the majority of its money. For most companies in the current competitive environment, you should assume this will be a 6-12 month window.

Build Emerging Businesses: Emerging business's are in the 1-2 year time horizon. This is the next big offering that will keep your business on top, once your current cash cow is a commodity. You should be spending about 30% of your efforts in this space, so that when the time is right, these offerings will become your core business.

Invest in Future Options: Future options are in the 2+ year horizon. This is your companies R&D. It is especially important for services businesses, as it is often forgotten. You want about 10% of your effort in this space right now. If you are a startup, this could be as simple as getting the team together for drinks after work and coming up with a few ideas on where your product could get to. The key point is to be thinking about it. As your emerging business becomes your core, so to does your best R&D item become your next emerging business option, and so the cycle continues.

I have found that this is a simple and effective strategy model that can work in large organizations down to a bootstrapping startup. It is a simple effective visual that gets people thinking the right way about sustaining your business, and can be easily communicated.

Internet Evolution

2007-01-20T22:32:00.000-07:00

Putting the Web into numeric releases has become very popular to indicate a new evolution on the Internet, although somewhat of a misnomer. It implies a specific point in time for transition (like a software release), when it seems more like a loosely defined time period (like geological periods) characterized by the by the thinking and technology of the time. Maybe we should come up with names that are less finite, however until that happens we seem to be stuck with numbers. Web 2.0 is the current period of evolution that we are in and although there are still Web1.0 companies around, most are either evolving or will become extinct, as newer breeds of applications take over as survival of the fittest takes hold.

The next evolution known as web 3.0 is also thrown around, and often by people that have no idea what it really means (mostly people in the media), but is it their fault or a fault of the people that are supposedly driving the evolution? Maybe the technical people driving the next evolution forward need to come up with better ways of describing it, or maybe they shouldn't be driving it at all... For example - Web 3.0 has also been called the semantic web. I consider myself a technically savvy person, and have done some research into this arena, but in the beginning I had trouble understanding it once you get beyond the elevator pitch, [Websites that are smart about what they are and what they contain], and I still have trouble describing it to others in any type of detail. It sounds great, but what does it really mean? These evolutions need to be described in ways that communicate to people the value that future evolutions can offer, which will in turn likely move us in that direction more quickly.

Seth Godin, talks about Web 4.0. No - its not something you will find exhaustive writing about in the WC3, however after reading his post, although I am not a big fan of the 'release notation' I feel like I have a better idea of what 4.0 could be. He describes it not with a definition statement or a long white paper, but with a series of needs that he (and likely many others have) that could be solved by a future evolution of the Internet.

... it is about activity, not just data, and most human activity takes place offline....

Example of one of his listed needs:
I'm booked on a flight from Toledo to Seattle. It's cancelled. My phone knows that I'm on the flight, knows that it's cancelled and knows what flights I should consider instead. It uses semantic data but it also has permission to interrupt me and tell me about it. Much more important, it knows what my colleagues are doing in response to this event and tells me. 'Follow me' gets a lot easier.

As a whole, its not clear nor succinct, however to me a list of needs does a better job at stimulating thought, than any technical definition someone could come up with, primarily because it give businesses and entrepreneurs a starting point for innovation. Who needs a definition really and besides, why try and box in the future? If we move to create business value, the evolution will happen and we can worry about creating a definition for it after we get there.

The Evolution & Integration of Search

2007-01-17T21:31:00.000-07:00

Yes, I am sure we are all getting tired of the predictions for 2007, but here is an interesting post on the continuing evolution of search from Lynetter. Search is really what is enabling the Internet. It is now the starting point for most people who use this medium. In reality however it is still in its infancy. Lynetter has some interesting thoughts on how it will evolve over the next year. We all use it, but how much do we really understand it. As a company, I feel that understanding Search, and SEO will become extremely important to any business that needs to communicate to its customers (ie - all). Now that I am in the business of search, I find it fascinating how entire models and discussions around software design and development revolve so much around how design decisions will impact/enhance/impede search. I believe that this thinking actually goes beyond software, to many other business decisions. Anything from company name to how data/content should be structured, or defining marketing plans. Search is becoming as important to business as any other tool out there - how can it be more effectively utilized in your business strategy?

Re-Thinking Traditional Media Channels

2007-01-16T21:06:00.000-07:00

In a world where advertisers are scrambling to move to the new media channels, it is important to remember that although the Internet is growing rapidly, people still get out, and get away. Also, it is very likely that in more traditional settings advertisers may get better eye contact. On the Internet you may be bombarded with dozens of ads within a few minutes which makes people often immune to these items. But take roadside billboards. It is unlikely that drivers are doing much more multitasking that they have always done - talking on a phone, or listening to some form of audio, but their eyes are only focused on driving. They aren't scanning content, or flipping from topic to topic in seconds. Still a decent way to advertise, and now with a bit of technology, it may just get even better. Mini is now bringing some personality to billboards. Other traditional media will likely soon follow.

Outsourcing Strategies & Rural Development

2007-01-14T14:17:00.000-07:00

An article recently in business week where a company in India is pushing outsourcing from the major cities to the rural areas to both reduce costs and at the same time bring a better standard of living and quality of life to people who want to stay closer to family or pursue community roles. The article focus's on GramIT (gram is the Sanskrit word for "village") who is seeking to transplant India's tech services boom to some of the country's 600,000 villages.

It is a win-win if they can make it work. To me it isn't a lot different than the concept of homesourcing that some companies in the US utilize, but what makes it interesting is how quickly India is innovating in this way, especially given the lack of infrastructure to these locations.

I think this movement could also be advanced in North America to bring back life to rural areas. Not everyone wants to move to the city for work and most are willing to earn a little less to stay in rural areas if given the opportunity. I am a big proponent of outsourcing, but its important think about your options - offshore may not be the solution to everything. Think about the skills and services you require, and then come up with an outsourcing strategy that can both reduced costs and make life better for all parties involved.

Personal Shift

2007-01-14T13:42:00.000-07:00

My blog has been quiet this past week - This is due to a career move that started monday. I have taken a position with a local startup Balihoo, and my mind has been swollen, and tired trying to weave myself into the team fabric as quickly as possible, leaving little time for me to put thoughts into the blog. The first week of a new job is always tough, but for me working with this small team where everyone from the CEO down is dedicated and driven and working together to make the company a success makes every day exciting. It is the most 'alive' I have felt at work in a very long time, and that is exactly why I will likely never move back into a large company environment. Timelines are in days or weeks, not months or years. You see the impact of what you are doing to improve company value quickly and clearly. Customer focus is everything - not something on a powerpoint slide, and passion as well as creativity are the rule, not the exception. I look forward to applying my learnings to future posts.

Don't Be a Player

2007-01-07T20:04:00.000-07:00

The new year is a great time for blog reading. Everyone is back from needed time off fresh with new thoughts and ideas. Here is a great analogy about how companies/brands often treat their customers by Alain Thys. He uses the analogy of a one night stand, or in this case a 'one night brand. where the company appears to be intersted...

"They advertise, promote, seduce and sell to get us to trust and believe them. And once we have fallen for their charms, we get a box with product and a customer service number which doesn't really want to answer our calls."

Companies often act like 'players' to their customers, often without even knowing it. Just remember players either eventually grow up, or then end up old fat and single still trying to play the same old tricks, but getting nowhere. Talk AND act like the kind of company your customer will want to have a relationship with.

Social Media and Business

2007-01-05T08:13:00.000-07:00

Most companies know about social networks, and have heard the terms social media and social software, but has it went any further than a buzz word for most? These tools are more than just a way for your teenage kids to spend more time talking to your friends, post their 'deep' thoughts or pictures online. The Net Savvy Executive has created a Social Media Midterm Exam. Now by the very fact that you are reading this post either online or through an RSS reader, already puts you ahead of the game, but pass it on to some others in your organization. It may get a needed discussion going - how these tools can be applied to making your business more effective. The first two questions alone should be enough to invoke the conversation:

Describe each of the following:
1. Blog
2. Del.icio.us
3. Digg
4. Flickr
5. LinkedIn
6. Mashup
7. MySpace
8. Podcast
9. RSS
10. Second Life
11. Technorati
12. Wikipedia
13. YouTube
How could you use each of the items from question 1 as a marketing tool? What are the risks associated with each?

Business often follows consumer trends with software, and typically for good reason, but its time to take a serious look. It doesn't mean that all will apply to your business, but with some innovative thinking you might be able to either make your current strategy more effective or open up new opportunities. Second, whether you use them or not other people are so you need to listen. Third, don't just think about your external interactions (eg marketing), think about uses internally for increasing efficiencies, building a better culture or relationship with your employees. Related to this - think about expectations of new employees. As consumer and business productivity software begin to blur, new employees will be expecting to have access to these types of productivity tools. It will not be sufficient for an 'innovative' company to just block access to youTube or state that they are not approved applications.

Wisdom of Crowds = Collective Intelligence

2007-01-03T09:11:00.000-07:00

I am nearing the end of 'The Wisdom of Crowds' by James Surowiecki, and this morning I came across a great post by Kathy Sierra on the Dumbness of Crowds. She doesn't disagree with Surowiecki, but she does point out the mis-perception that many people have about what the wisdom of crowds really means. (ie. Read the book, don't just quote the title).

In what is potentially the most misleading book/idea title in the history of the world, the "Crowds" in "The Wisdom of Crowds" was never meant to mean "mobs", "groups acting as one", "committees", "consensus" or even "high collaboration"

This becomes very important today with Web 2.0 because giving power to the community (the crowds) is a key tenant of its makeup. Letting the community make decision. But community consensus does not equal collective intelligence. Kathy posts a number of great examples to highlight the different between collective intelligence vs 'the dumbness of crowds'.

"Collective intelligence" is a pile of people writing Amazon book reviews.

"Dumbness of Crowds" is a pile of people collaborating on a wiki to collectively author a book.

"Collective Intelligence" is all the photos on Flickr, taken by individuals on their own, and the new ideas created from that pool of photos

"Dumbness of Crowds" is expecting a group of people to create and edit a photo together.

"Collective Intelligence" is about getting input and ideas from many different people and perspectives.

"Dumbness of Crowds" is blindly averaging the input of many different people, and expecting a breakthrough.

She goes on to say:
It's the sharp edges, gaps, and differences in individual knowledge that make the wisdom of crowds work, yet the trendy (and misinterpreted) vision of Web 2.0 is just the opposite--get us all collaborating and communicating and conversing all together as one big happy collaborating, communicating, conversing thing until our individual differences become superficial.

The entire discussion is extremely relevant in our current environment of web 2.0 tools. Its important to make sure that the tools make their best effort to harness collective intelligence instead of creating a large group decision acting together as a single entity.

If the Wisdom of crowds is relevant or potentially relevant to your business read/listen to the book closely - it will make you think.

Creative Thinking + Heart = Success

2007-01-02T07:42:00.000-07:00

No matter where you are, there are sporting events that prove that history and longevity don't always guarantee success in a championship game. Underdogs often pull off amazing wins and luck has often very little to do with it. Both teams have skilled players, but often the difference lies with some creative thinking and a large amount of heart and spirit. Take the US College football Fiesta Bowl last night where the Boise State Broncos pulled off an incredible win over the Oklahoma Sooners. After looking like they were about to blow a narrow lead with a turnover, they came back with some amazingly innovative plays to tie again with 7 seconds and then win in overtime. However great the creative play-making was, this isn't what allowed them to take home the win, it was the heart, drive and commitment that allowed them to triumph over the heavily favored competition.

In your company it is important to be innovative, but you also need heart. Trying to build an innovative organization is hard enough - building heart and spirit on a team is even more challenging since there is no guaranteed way to create it, and often you don't know its there until you are faced with a challenge that could make or break you.

Take a lesson from sports and think about building heart as well as creative thinking in your organization.

Blockbuster Using Its Assets For Innovation

2007-01-01T21:33:00.000-07:00

Watching my home team Boise State play in the Fiesta Bowl tonight, I noticed the sponsorship by Blockbuster and its new offering Total Access Service which is competing against the current leader in mail order movies - Netflix. Blockbuster has had a similar offering to Netflix since 2005, but although they could replicate the basic model, their service and efficiency wasn’t as good as Netflix, and the results were less than stellar. Some companies would just regress back to their legacy model, but Blockbuster evolved its Total Access Service into a new business model innovation.

They replicate the model of Netflix, but then they add an additional service that takes advantage of their existing brick and mortar assets. Not only can you mail your movies back once you finished, you can bring them back to store, and pick up new movies from their as well. Instead of trying to compete with their existing legacy movie delivery model alone, or trying distance themselves from the model that built the company and move to compete on the same service as Netflix they combine aspects of both models to offer business value that cannot be replicated by Netflix.

Many such as Tech Crunch blogger Michael Arrington are deciding that Total Access is a much better option and are switching. They use a great play from the startup playbook on this current add campaign. They compare their sevice directly to a known player (Netflix) in the commercial, and then explain how their offering is better. This is compelling for Netflix users, as well as current blockbuster customers who are thinking about using a mail order movie service.

In an era where many traditional business are being impacted by digitization and internet business models, its great to see examples of companies using current expertise coupled with creative thinking to create competitive advantage. Their next challenge is when broadband infrastructure becomes robust enough to deliver movies purely in digital format.

Blog Maturity

2006-12-29T12:41:00.000-07:00

As the year draws to a close, I thought I would post some thoughts on my foray into blogging this year. For me blogging is a way to keep my thinking sharp and creative.

I can capture and flesh out thoughts. The very act of writing something down in a succinct way for a blog post helps you refine concepts and cements them better into your thoughts.
It helps me become a better writer. I have heard it said that if you cannot write well you should stay away from blogging. I say “If you want to get better at writing – start a blog”
It allows me to expand my thinking on topics by joining and starting conversations with other people that have very valuable insights. It has helped me connect with people locally as well as others around the world.

Daniel Scocco (author of Innovation Zen Blog) started daily blogging tips this year. He recently posted about writing timeless content, and in this post what I feel is the key tip was writing content that adds value. I have been thinking about this and came up with this visual around blog maturity. There is a positive correlation between content value and conversation potential which together produced a high value blog. I grouped maturity into 4 categories.

Aggregators: These are blogs that just link to other blogs. They help you find topical content, but there is limited to no potential for conversation.

Content Delivery: These are blogs that generate content, but the value of the content is often highly variable. There is some potential for conversation, but the content is sometimes marginally interesting or just a transfer from another source. (creator often has limited ability to add to his/her own conversation)

Derivative Thought: These are blogs that take an existing conversation and add their own spin or thought to expand the conversation or take it in a different direction.

Original Thought: These are blogs that take a concept (new or existing) and start conversations by infusing a new thought.

The great thing about this model is that you don’t have to start at the bottom. You can start at any place. Your position in the model is dependant on the creativity of your thought, not on your tenure. Think about how blogs can help the thinking in your business or for yourself.

Gartner is predicting that rate of blogging will slow, but I think all that this means is that the lower quality and lower maturity blogs will start to drop off. Business blogs will increase, and blogs in general will get better as people understand the medium. In general I think the overall blogsphere will likely see an increase in maturity even with a slowdown.

Game Mechanics In Your Business

2006-12-28T07:57:00.000-07:00

A while back I blogged about how Joi Ito is experimenting with new management techniques inside of WOW. Here is a great slide show from Shufflebrain about using game mechanics in the context of social software to create applications that are fun, compelling and addictive. One of the keys to social software is giving people a reason to come back after their first visit. Social software needs to do something, or people won't stay. The mechanics presented are the following:

Collecting
Points
Feedback
Exchanges
Customization

In addition to building software, I also feel that these constructs are just as applicable to building a successful business and culture. The wisdom of crowds talks about the success of internal prediction markets which uses game mechanics to engage employees to think collectively. No matter where you are, people love games. Think about the creative ways that these game mechanics could be utilized in your business to improve moral, culture, or delivered business value.

Growth Comes from the Edges

2006-12-27T07:41:00.000-07:00

As I start to get my head back into blogging after Christmas, I came across this quote from a Seth Godin Post on Dec 25. His discussion centers around companies who try and emulate extremely successful competitors, and why this is not a great strategy.

I recently did some work with a large grocery store chain, and in one meeting I was in someone made the comment that we should be like Walmart. Seth's post states the issue with this type of thinking:

they already did what you are setting out to do (no reason for people to switch)
these companies were cutting edge when they first introduced their business model (and hence why they became successful)

Taking best practices from successful competitors is one thing, but you need to bring your own value-add to the market place. Just like great music or movies often come from the fringe, so do great ideas, and this is what will drive growth. Emulating your competitors to create growth is a failed red-ocean strategy. Ideas and growth from the edge is blue ocean.

Technology?

2006-12-21T09:02:00.000-07:00

With the holiday season in full swing, think about this old quote from Alan Kay:

"Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born."

As children and young family members open gifts - many of these gifts will be 'technology' items - mp3 players, cell phones, gaming systems, laptops etc. This quote is more relevant than ever now. What most people in business consider technology, many customers consider it just another everyday item.

Photo Credit: Macadamia Blog

Mild Hunger Increases Cognition

2006-12-20T08:55:00.000-07:00

Ever notice how productivity drops around the holidays. People begin to mentally check out, as they begin to think about time with family, and holiday festivities. In addition the workplace is usually filled with goodies, and holiday snacks. Well as it turns out having a full stomach may be partially to blame for a lower ability to think, and not just around the holidays. According to researchers at the Yale medical school the stimulation of hunger can make you smarter.

A team led by Tamas Horvath, chairman of Yale’s comparative medicine program, had been analyzing the pathways followed in mouse brains by ghrelin, a hormone produced by the stomach lining, when the stomach is empty. To the scientists’ surprise, they found that ghrelin was binding to cells not just in the primitive part of the brain that registers hunger (the hypothalamus) but also in the region that plays a role in learning, memory and spatial analysis (the hippocampus).

The researchers then put mice injected with ghrelin and control mice through a maze and other intelligence tests. In each case, the biochemically “hungry” mice — mice infused with ghrelin — performed notably better than those with normal levels of the hormone.

They conclude that this is likely true for humans as well. Going mildly hungry and snacking can maintain an edgy state. So bringing in those donuts or holiday treats for you team, might not be the best idea if you want to keep innovation levels high and thinking sharp!

Our Mental Hard Drive

2006-12-19T20:55:00.000-07:00

This is a great visual about information, and how much of it we see every day. Think about what this means - We see 1MB of information every second. This is only going to increase. What is the capacity for your mental hard drive? What is it for your customers? How do you make the best use of their limited capacity. Although this may seem dismal to marketers, In some ways I feel that the increased volume of content, is allowing the human brain to reach a great potential for information consumption. And now, as we develop new and better external tools to help us categorize and filter, it also allows our own hard drives to re-configure how it remembers things.

By the way check out lynetters other visual quotation images on Flickr - Just like this image, they will likely make you re-think your business.

Agile 'Pit Crew' Process

2006-12-19T20:15:00.000-07:00

For all the big company focus on process improvements, it now seems that the term process is somewhat of a dirty word in small companies or startups who are focused on speed to market. Process, like everything, if it is overdone, it can be harmful and actually impede the very thing it was meant to improve. Too much and you become buried in trying to follow a set of steps, and checklists instead of accomplishing goals and fulfilling customer needs. Too little and you stagnate in chaos. Both lead to unhappy endings.

This got me thinking about the right amount of process in small company or start up (or perhaps any company for that matter). The analogy that came to mind was that of a formula 1 or Nascar pit crew. Pit crews have a series of tasks that must be carried out and others that are option depending on the condition of the car when it arrives. All have to be done quickly. Although it seems chaotic, there is process there, and great pit crews work like a finely tuned orchestra. Process is why the car doesn't get dropped without the wheel nuts on.

So even with a start up - some process is important. We have come to know this as Agile. Unfortunately some people thing that Agile is a throwback to to uncontrolled chaos before there was any process. Agile process at its best is finely tuned chaos that produces beautiful music. The key to fast process is to think not about documented steps and checklists, but about 3 things. The first two are frameworks and guidelines. The third and primary ingredient is skilled team members. Just like most of us would kill the process of a pit crew - so can ineffective members on any team. These 3 things supported by the right mindset, can allow process to become a powerful asset no matter how small (or big) you are if used appropriately.

YOU Rule

2006-12-17T15:44:00.000-07:00

Today Time anounced its person of the year. If you haven't heard of who it is go look in the mirror. That's right - its you. I have seen a number of posts already come across my RSS reader talking about it today. Most are treating this as validation that user controlled content is not a fad. Time has been picking its 'Person of the Year' since 1927 and the aim has always been to pick "the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or for ill, and embodied what was important about the year, for better or for worse."

This also should be a signal to businesses ... if you are unaware of what the long tail is, you don't understand blogging or think that blogging is just a fad, you think that online communities are just another channel to sell your products, and web 2.0 doesn't have a place in the corporate world, Time's person of the year will likely be very confusing to you...

Innovation Coverage of All Customer Needs

2006-12-13T07:46:00.000-07:00

John Caddell posted this week about an alternative approach to product innovation. He discusses an HBR article written by Professor Robert Verganti about the Lombardy design cluster utilized for design innovation that uses a small community of diverse professionals...

'a free-floating community of architects, suppliers, photographers, critics, curators, publishers, and craftsmen, among many other categories of professionals, as well as the expected artists and designers. The members of the community are prized as much for their immersion in a discourse as for their originality.'

John starts off by asking 'tired of hearing about open innovation'. This comes from a a growing movement today towards talking to your employees, customers, and suppliers for better innovation. I am a proponent of talking to your customers, I believe in the wisdom of crowds, but I can see that there are areas of innovation where customers can't always be the source for all innovation.

This got me thinking about Innovation coverage. To be a truly effective innovator, I think a company needs to have a suite of innovation options depending on the needs. Think about the Kano Model used in Process Engineering. It talks about 3 different types of requirements that are produced.

Disatisfiers: aspects of a product/service that will cause dissatisfaction if not present. (eg. - brakes on a car)
Satisfiers: aspects of a product where more is better. (gas mileage - the better gas mileage your car gets, the happier you are)
Delighters: these are aspects of a product that the customer didn't expect, but when they are their, the customer is delighted. This is often the purple cows that Seth Godin talks about. (eg. - A sunroof in a car... when it first came out at least, or a chocolate on your pillow at the hotel)

The problem with Delighters, is that customers can't often envision these types of innovations, so if you business is built primarily on producing delighters, this design cluster model described above is likely a better option for coming up with ideas in this industry.

However, in reality, innovation can and should happen in all three levels of the Kano Model. Unfortunately today most companies don't utilize all tools at their disposal. Just like building a house, a hammer won't work for all tasks. Today many companies take the hammer approach to innovation. Most often the hammer is an internal R&D department. What companies need to do is develop an innovation tool belt where they can tap your customers, expert communities, internal and external R&D experts well as the wisdom of crowds based on the need. The second step is knowing when to best utilize the different tools during the innovation life cycle and for what tasks, and what products or services they should be used for to give you the highest innovation efficiency. Having a full set of tools along with the knowledge of when and how to use them, will set a company up better to approach their innovation imperative.

Real Estate Agent Industry Disruption Continues

2006-12-07T06:09:00.000-07:00

Most of us know that it is only a matter of time before real estate agents follow the same downward path as travel agents as the Internet allows information to flow more freely and new tools empower consumers to almost complete transactions themselves. real estate agents, like travel agents will continue to exist for complicated transactions, but the lucrative days for the typical agent are coming to an end. New tools such as Zillow will continue to disrupt the real estate world. They have just released new functionality called Make Me Move, which targets home owners who may have no intention of moving, but probably would for the right price. As a homeowner I can post a make me move price without exposing any personal information. Zillow then enables interested buyers to contact the owner anonymously. Of course the service is free for all home owners and realtors.

Now I am sure this service will be highly used by real estate agents as much or more than by home buyers, but as consumers become more savvy with these types of tools, it paves the way to remove the middleman altogether for all but the most complicated transactions. Current conventional wisdom now says: 'Why book a flight with a travel agent who will essentially use the same online tools as you have access too'. Soon, the same will be true for home buying. Real estate agents are just coming off the largest boom in housing history - time to think about how this industry will morph to survive as we move forward in the new economy.

information tip: Zillow on Tech Crunch

Tim Hortons - Modernize Your Thinking

2006-12-06T18:09:00.000-07:00

My blogging will be lighter over the next two weeks as I am back home in Ontario Canada visiting my family, but I will post as I can. Being back here, I got to thinking about an interesting retail phenomenon in Canada - Tim Hortons, which has almost a cult like following here. They started out as great coffee and donuts at an unbeatable price, but have moved into having a great lunch menu with soups and sandwiches too. All of this coupled with extremely friendly service, in a spotless environment. They offer unbeatable consistency - you know exactly what you are getting when you go in there, and are a staple of both rural and urban life. However some of the companies policies feel a little like stepping back in time.

The first is that they do not accept any form of payment except cash. I am sure they have some great arguments as to why this is a good business practice (low transaction amounts and speed of checkout) but whatever they are it seems that this came out of status-quo thinking. Not only is the policy not well signed (people can get all the way to ordering only to find out about the cash only policy), but they don't even offer alternatives (in-store cash machines). This policy feels like an un-innovative solution to the wrong problem.

A second interesting fact is that they appear to have no interest in building a relationship with their customers beyond that of a sales transaction. Somehow their own success has duped them into thinking that they know better than their own customers. On their web site under the FAQ section I found the following response to the question of "I would like to submit an idea to Tim Hortons":

"Tim Hortons is approached about many ideas, suggestions and new product concepts. Unfortunately, we are unable to accept unsolicited ideas. We rely entirely on our own advertising, research, marketing and product planning departments for the generation and development of new concepts. We thank you for thinking of us, but must decline to avoid the possibility of future misunderstandings"

Come on guys - do you honestly believe that you know better about what your customers want then they do? The Tim Hortons myspace page makes it obvious that the advertising/ marketing team needs a serious lesson in new economy marketing...

Tim Hortons is definitely a retail success and has found a way to build a loyal customer following, through good products and services. The will continue to grow as they expand into new territory, but I question if they are somehow limiting themselves with decision making that is so obviously not focused on building better relationships with their customers. They already have what many companies yearn for - loyal customers. By modernizing their thinking they could capitalize on their most underutilized asset -their customer.

Community Immunity - Will Social Networks Tip?

2006-12-01T13:35:00.000-07:00

I recently listed to the audio version of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. He has a more recent update to the end of the book where he talks about the concept of immunity and social epidemics.

He introduced the concept of the “fax effect” originally proposed by Kevin Kelly. If you are unfamiliar it goes like this: The first fax machine cost millions of R&D dollars, and retailed for a few thousand dollars, but was relatively useless since there were no other machines to communicate with. Each successive fax machine purchased made all the previous machines more valuable. When you bought a fax machine, you were buying access to the network which is much more valuable than the machine itself. This is referred to as the law of plentitude. Cell companies use a similar concept to market and sell their products and services. The logic of the network is that power and value come from abundance.

Gladwell continues to explain that this is why email is supposed to be so powerful, but is this true? Just like the phone network has grown so large that users have built up ‘immunity’ (answering machines, caller ID, and other filtering mechanisms), so too is this starting to happen with email. When you first got email, and had your first few members of the network, you spent much time and effort crafting well thought out messages. Now we get 1000 (hopefully filtered) spam emails, and often 10’s or hundreds of messages from people. Most email users are now creating shorter responses, being more selective and delayed in response. Gladwell argues that these are all symptoms of immunity, and that large network communication channels have, and will continue to suffer growth tipping points creating immunity, similar to how virus’s spread and eventually die once enough users become immune.

My question is whether this will happen to social networking communities, and I think unfortunately it will. Think about MySpace. Who can really manage a hundreds or thousands of ‘friends’. Once the novelty wears off, when does this network just become like the hundreds of emails you get. Social networks could too reach an immunity tipping point, where they become so large that the very reason that they seemed so attractive, cause its own demise. In a members’ quest to become connected, they are starting to repeat what other networks have already succumbed to. Linkedin is also beginning to show signs of this, with ‘super connectors’ who will link with anyone and everyone. It seems like a great way to grow the network, but this is essentially the beginning of a possible immunity tipping point. Ultimately it comes down to the community members to keep the social network thriving, but not letting it get out of control to a point where community immunity kicks in.

Physical to Digital for Value-Add

2006-11-29T19:57:00.000-07:00

I have gotten a little behind in my feed reading as of late, and just read this tech crunch post from last week about a new service offering called remote control mail.

"The service provides an alternative to PO Boxes, mail forwarding or waiting until you get home from the road to deal with your mail. The company receives your postal mail, scans the outside of what’s sent to you and provides a web interface to quickly sort through letters, bills, magazines and direct mailings."

Awesome idea with great market potential, but what is really interesting is that this is a great example of taking a very traditional everyday practices and thinking about a solution in an entirely different way. It makes me think about other common practices that could be supported with web based utilities. What other physical things can be digitized to add value? It comes down to looking at, and throwing out institutionalize practices (in this case - P.O. boxes, mail holds etc) that only make situations bearable, to coming up with a truly elegant solution to address the real need.

Even though I am not in a position to require this type of service right now, I would almost be tempted to sign up to block junk mail. It would almost be as simple as marking spam in your email box. What would be great is if you could mark a given sender as junk, and the service would learn and auto filter out future information from them. Gets me thinking about how the direct mail industry will react to this. Some will see this as a threat, but the smart ones will see this as an opportunity.

Six 'C'igma

2006-11-29T08:41:00.000-07:00

It seems like these days there is a shift away from extensive frameworks such as Six Sigma. I personally think that in most organizations full-blow Six Sigma initiatives are just too overwhelming to implement. It takes too long to see results, and in many cases the business has already changes, or the issue they are trying to correct has already had a negative impact on the organization. Unfortunately this translates into negative opinions on Six Sigma. I think it's more about effectively using parts and pieces of the framework. Thinking about how to best solve the issue, rather than blindly following Six Sigma steps because you have to. This is one reason why Lean (for both product and service companies) has become so successful. You can see results very quickly and don't need extensive statistical analysis to execute change.

As the business environment continues to change on a more rapid pace, frameworks are becoming more about concepts and patterns rather than strict processes. Jim Carroll has just posted what he is calling the 6 C framework for innovation within companies.

curiosity
creativity and rebellion
collaboration
change
courage
creating excitement every day

Of course the next logical question by many organizations is how you implement such a framework, so this is where all previous frameworks come into play. By understanding many different processes and tools, it allows you to customize for your own organizational needs. Don't throw out the old tools, just re-configure them to meet current business needs.

Startup mindset

2006-11-28T13:31:00.000-07:00

The days of life time employment are over. 5 years even seems like a long time in our current business climate. I think that job security lulled employees into a space of monotony, boundary based decision making, and flat thinking. What would you rather have - life time employment, or life time learning. Finding both is just a myth now.

Don't dispair - a very inspirational post about the mindset of a startup(by Andy Monfried). As stated in previous posts - startup thinking is not just for startups.

Medium vs. Format

2006-11-27T20:28:00.000-07:00

Last week I read an interesting article in Wired about the Lonelygirl15 phenomenon on the internet. Lonelygirl is a fictional video blogger, who was exposed as fictional, but has however not faded away but grown in popularity. This is a sign of how our culture and interests are shifting away from not only TV as a medium (the way in which the content is transferred), but also as a format (how the content is presented). To be fair, people do currently use the internet medium to get existing TV based content in the same format due to advantages around viewing convenience, however this is just the beginning. Gen Connect - the current generation of youth want things that ‘do stuff’. TV as a format is passive, and the internet is interactive. People continually want formats that are more interactive and real to them.

Miles Beckett the creator of Lonlygirl15 is thinking about the web as a ‘format’ and Network TV still sees the web as just a ‘medium’. These paragraphs from the wired article sum it up pretty well:

Beckett is clearly frustrated. "The Web isn't just a support system for hit TV shows," he says. "It's a new medium. It requires new storytelling techniques. The way the networks look at the Internet now is like the early days of TV, when announcers would just read radio scripts on camera. It was boring in the same way all this supplemental material is boring."

What's needed, he says, is content that's built specifically for the Web. It doesn't need to be lit like a film -- that would make it feel less real. The camera work should be simple. There shouldn't be a disembodied third-person camera -- a character is always filming the action. Each episode needs to be short, no more than three minutes. "You wouldn't show a sitcom at a movie theater, right?" Beckett says. "You make movies for the big screen, sitcoms for TV, and something else entirely for the Internet. That's the lesson of Lonelygirl15."

Additionally, TV is fast losing its hold on being a primary entertainment delivery mechanism. Today networks see the web as mainly as a support mechanism for TV deliver content and format. Not overly innovative. As Beckett eludes to – the web can and should become a primary medium on its own with possibly ‘TV-like’ content BUT not constrained by the format. The web will not replace TV, just as TV didn’t replace radio or movies, but disrupting thinking on current business models show the innovative possibilities with new mediums.

Manifesto’s to think about

2006-11-24T13:38:00.000-07:00

Manifesto: a public declaration of intentions, opinions, objectives, or motives...

Hugh Macleod has been taking submissions for ‘manifesto’s to change the world 500 words at a time' – Here are a couple of good ones to make you think differently about your business:

1. Hugh’s updates (and much shorter) Hughtrain manifesto on marketing. My 3 favorites:

Your customers are becoming smarter about your market a lot faster than you are
A company's primary role is to function as an "idea amplifier"
The more porous the membrane that separates your business from your market, the easier it is for both parties to be in alignment

2. A submission from Rodrigo Dauster entitled the Elusive Customer Manifesto. Couple snips to get you thinking…

“Don't ask me what I want. To ask is to admit you don't know. If you don't know, it means you haven't been listening.”
Stop telling me what else I need to be happy. We all know that more this and more that will only lead me into a down-ward spiraling, unfulfilling consumption binge. If you really want to add value -- to be different -- show me how I can get more with less: simplify, defeature, unbundle, open up.

There are certain people that think about the world differently – listen up, and it may allow you to do it as well, and stand out from your competition.

Consultants and Blogging

2006-11-21T22:10:00.000-07:00

A consultant is a special breed of professional. They bring specialized skills to help companies manage complexities and undergo change. Because they deal with change and often seek out opportunities in this area they are typically the sort to try out new things such as Blogs. According to Naked Conversations consultants are important to blogging for two reasons:

Consultants who blog are building reputations that make them category leaders, whether that category is defined by geography or niche. Their opinions are becoming more important in influencing markets.
Consulting expertise has started to evangelize and deliver blogging into other businesses. They are now seeding blogging into corporate strategies the way they previously germinated PC’s and web sites. We believe they will play key roles in the phase of blog adoption that has started to occur.

In fact, this is very much a win-win situation because blogs are also important to consultants!

Personal Marketing: Blogs allow consultants to market themselves in an authentic way by offering a mechanism to show clients what you think about and how you think about it. Traditionally a web site was where you pointed people, but in my mind the primary vehicle for consultants should be the blog. A website is of secondary importance. The blog is the traffic generator – not the static web site.

Knowledge Sharing & Idea development: Blogs bring a sense of community to a group of individuals who are often on their own for the most part. Its allow the collective knowledge of consultants to be shared in whatever niche you operate in. My philosophy is to share all you know, and it will come back to you in a positive way. I have learned much from consultant bloggers I read from around the globe, and I strive to return the favor. In addition blogs also offer mechanisms to ‘try on’ and explore new concepts with your reading peers, before presenting to clients, and also allows you to share lessons leaned (being careful to protect confidentiality).

If you are a consultant, consider taking the time to blog – you will find it well worth your while. If you have to choose between building a web site and a blog - start with the blog.

My appologies - comments are back on....

2006-11-21T20:31:00.000-07:00

I got an email today from a friend and reader(Thanks Valerie!), who informed me that my comments were not turned on! My appologies - I must have flipped the setting by accident, but it has been remedied now, and I invite and encourage comments on my posts. Based on some of my posts - how hypocritical that must have seemed to anyone who tried to leave a comment! Blog-on.

Building Authentic Relationships With Customers

2006-11-20T09:13:00.000-07:00

This year, I decided it was time to get some help on organizing my financial assets. I started working with a small firm - Mueller Investments, after getting to know, and trust the team of this small, yet big company.

They just sent out their holiday gift to their clients, and it is a great example of exceptional customer service. It was a box of goodies (food items etc), with a booklet, and it was the booklet, more than the items, that made this holiday gift exceptional. The booklet contained a page for each employee along with a personal story about one of the items in the box, that they had selected for inclusion, and why. The products are as diverse at the team itself – from authentic Mexican hot chocolate to a favorite specialty hot sauce. Long after the products are consumed, I will remember the booklet. In an industry that is moving more towards commoditization, new products and services will help draw customers but a trusting relationship will make them long term partners. Move over Charles Schwab. In the information age, big no longer means better. Another example of Small is the New Big.

'Citizen Marketers' and 'The Tipping Point'

2006-11-19T12:38:00.000-07:00

I am excited to read the new book by Ben Mcconnel & Jackie Hubba entitled Citizen Marketers, but in a recent post by Ben on the 4F’s, I couldn’t help but notice the similarities between the 4F's and the concepts introduced in the Malcolm Gladwell’s 2000 book – The Tipping Point around categories of people who have the power to produce social epidemics.

Citizen Marketers F1 – Filters: Filters are human Wire Services. They collect traditional media stories, bloggers’ rants and raves, podcasts, or fan creations about a specific company or brand and then package this information into a daily or near-daily stream of links, story summaries, and observations.

Tipping Point Parallel - Mavens: A maven is someone who has a disproportionate influence on other members of the network. They are intense gatherers of information and impressions, and so are often the first to pick up on new or nascent trends.

Citizen Marketers F2 – Fanatics: The Fanatics are true believers and evangelists. They love to analyze the daily or weekly progress of a brand, product, organization, or person and prescribe courses of action. They are, essentially, volunteer coaches.

Tipping Point Parallel - Salesmen: Charismatic people with powerful negotiation skills. They exert "soft" influence rather than forceful power. Their source of influence may be the tendency of others, subconsciously, to imitate them rather than techniques of conscious persuasion.

Citizen Marketers F3 – Facilitators: Facilitators are community creators. Their primary citizen marketer tool is a Web-based bulletin board or community software. Facilitators are like the mayors of online towns, and some online communities exceed the populations of small cities.

Tipping Point Parallel - Connectors: Those with wide social circles. They are the "hubs" of the human social network and responsible for the small world phenomenon. They are the kinds of people who know everyone.

The 4^th 'F' in the Citizen Marketers is a Firecracker. Firecrackers are the one-hit wonders of citizen marketers. They can attract considerable attention because they have created a song, animation, video, or novelty that generates a lot of interest but tends to die out quickly as the creators go on with their other work.

The interesting thing about a firecracker is that they wouldn’t make it very far without the easily available production tools and the support (although short sometimes) of the other 3 F’s and their equivalent Tipping point persona.

The fact that they are similar is probably no coincidence. The concept of The Tipping Point, is exactly why Citizen Marketing is successful.

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Web 3.0

2006-11-17T09:04:00.000-07:00

It seems that the web is reinventing itself (at least by creative Journalists) faster than Microsoft releases new versions of its software.... I thought that this cartoon/post by Hugh Macleod seemed appropriate.

Social Media Relations

2006-11-17T08:28:00.000-07:00

On the Net-Savvy Executive Blog there is a post about yet another up-and-coming role in the corporate world around Social Media Relations. I have heard people talk about blogger relations, but as this post points out, it should be much more broad to include all types of social media. I posted a while back about monitoring Wikipedia, which would fall in this category.

Nathan Gilliatt – the bogs owner says:
"I view social media relations (SMR) as an interdisciplinary specialty that spans marketing, technology, and Internet culture—three components of any successful strategy for engaging social media. It's probably an internal function, but where it belongs on the org chart and how big it should be is a question for individual companies to consider."

When company leadership eventually picks up on this the likely reaction might be to let the role fall to someone in IT but as one commenter (toby) pointed out, that it fall under marketing. I agree that social media isn't IT, but I don't think it's marketing either. I am not sure that many marketing departments could handle this role, at least today. Its technology, marketing, customer/public relations, customer services, and even R&D and Product management to some degree. The SMR will truly need to be able to bridge across many groups within an organization to be successful.

Blogs as an Extension to Your Resume

2006-11-16T15:00:00.000-07:00

When you attempt to sell your offering to the job market, the traditional tool for this has always been a resume. Resumes are the ‘traditional media’ way to advertise your skill set. They are somewhat impersonal, and one dimensional in what they communicate (a list of skills and accomplishments). As with traditional media there was a time when this method was highly effective – when knowing a skill was all that mattered to carrying out a job. Now as we have progressed away from office workers, through knowledge workers and more towards self directed innovators, a resume with a list of skills doesn’t really seem to tell the whole story.

Now, just as blogs are allowing companies to create more authentic relationships and better communication with their customers, so too could it be used to help with personal marketing and fill in where traditional resumes leave off. This is not about taking the contents of your resume and posting it on a blog. (Some marketers in companies made this mistake by trying to advertising products through a blog). A blog can give you an opportunity to show prospective employers/clients how you think. As jobs become less task based (where the tools matter) to more about the optimal application of those tools to solve business problems in innovative ways, a blog can be a mechanism to showcase this.

Also, just as new media won’t replace traditional media in the corporate marketing sense; neither will blogs fully replace the resume. It’s about correct application of the tools to optimize success, and what you want out of your career. If you want to be an office worker – use a resume. If you want to be a self directed innovator, try using a blog.