Mark Anderson: 10 Technology Predictions for 2009

1.) It will be a big year for applications that can play on big screens.
2.) The big news in the mobile world will be smart phone applications.
3.) The blush is off the China rose.
4.) Flash-based computing will really take off.
5.) Wall computing gets traction.
6.) Carry-along computers will be hot.
7.) LTE (Long Term Evolution) will be the preferred technology for 4G.
8.) The less developed world will finally see widespread availability of broadband.
9.) Voice recognition will finally work right.
10.) The Internet Assistant will be born.
Don’t ask me, I’m simply reporting what Mark Anderson’s saying.
The one I’m certain about is the “carry-along” computer. I want real laptop computing in the size of a Penguin paperback. Are you listening, Apple?

Accenture: How To Create A Culture Of High Performance

Accenture is advertising How To Create A Culture Of High Performance.
I agree with them that “the central attribute of a successful leader is the ability to change the way people think.
But I completely disagree when they say that “Successful leaders get everyone to share the same mindsets.”
I think the opposite is true: successful leaders bring together diverse points of view to challenge each other and present different alternatives, thus helping the leader make informed, effective decisions.
What Accenture is calling “mindsets” is really groupthink. Groupthink is a recipe for disaster, not high performance.
In the course of a two-year investigation, Accenture determined five “mindsets” which matter most in improving business performance:
Mindset 1: Maintain the Right Balance Between Market-Making and Disciplined Execution by Avoiding False Trade-offs and Committing to a Dual Focus on Present and Future.
Mindset 2: Identify and Multiply Talent by Investing a Disproportionate Amount of Time in Recruiting and Developing People.
Mindset 3: Use A Selective Scorecard to Measure Business Performance By Relying on a Simple, Memorable Way of Measuring Success and Using Every Occasion to Share Success Stories Throughout the Organization.
Mindset 4: Recognize Technology as a Strategic Asset by Investing in Technologies that Demonstrably Lead to Better Business Performance.
Mindset 5: Emphasize Continuous Renewal by Ensuring the Organization Understands What to Preserve and What to Jettison.

Seth Godin teaches the New York Times How to Compete

In my line work (consulting) I run into all kinds of executive mindsets. In the publishing world, however, these mindsets tend to be rather stodgy at best, reptilian at worst.
Publishers don’t understand the web. And Seth Godin takes the New York Times to task, pointing out so many obvious misses and near-misses, that you have to ask why. Why don’t publishers get it? Why do they insist on playing it safe, even as their ship sinks below them?
Godin’s answer is right on target: “organizations are run by people who want to protect the old business, not develop the new one.”
This is what VG talks about as well.
In just about any large company, the people running the show are great at yesterday’s business, not tomorrow’s.
Please read Godin’s post >>

More Obama Lessons for Business

Bill George (yes, Medtronic’s Bill George) gives us a few more lessons learned from the Obama victory:
• Obama created a grassroots movement by building an ever-expanding organization of empowered leaders, who in turn engaged people from their social networks like Facebook.
• The entire organization was aligned around a single goal—electing Obama as President—and operated with common values (“Offer messages of hope, don’t denigrate our opponents, refuse to make deals”).
• Campaign leaders subordinated their egos and personal ambitions to the greater goal. Those who deviated quickly exited.
• Obama set a clear, consistent tone from the top (“No Drama Obama”), and never wavered, even when things weren’t going well.
• Obama’s greater mission transcended internal goals, such as fund-raising, endorsements, and campaign events, but each of these areas had goals tied to the greater mission.
• The campaign team used the most modern Internet tools to communicate, motivate, and inspire people and to guide their actions. Each day, 5 million people received personal messages from campaign headquarters or even Obama himself. This organization collaborated across a wide range of geographies and campaign functions, all tightly integrated nationally and executed locally.
Finally, just in case you missed the other business lessons, here you go >>

Shoshana Zuboff: Obama’s Victory is Capitalism 2.0

Writes Zuboff in BusinessWeek:
“This column is dedicated to the top managers of American business whose policies and practices helped ensure Barack Obama’s victory. The mandate for change that sounded across this country is not limited to our new President and Congress. That bell also tolls for you. Obama’s triumph was ignited in part by your failure to understand and respect your own consumers, customers, employees, and end users. The despair that fueled America’s yearning for change and hope grew to maturity in your garden.”
Years ago I remember reading Zuboff’s In the Age of the Smart Machine and thinking that no one in corporate management really wants real transparency… and that the information value-chain she described was doomed to failure.
Luckily, I was wrong. Now Obama will bring process transparency to government and business.
Asks Zuboff:
“…can we invent a business model in which advocacy, support, authenticity, trust, relationship, and profit are linked?”
“Yes, we must,” she concludes.
Read the article >>
And read her book: The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism
>>

Business Lessons Learned from President-Elect Barack Obama

What should the new President’s priorities be? Here are some views from a few CEOs interviewed by BusinessWeek:

It’s a cliche, but big business fears Democratic leaders. Turns out that Democratic presidents are better for the economy than Republicans! Details, details
Jack Welch has his own take on why Obama succeeded: a clear vision, clean execution, and friends in high places.
A far more insightful piece comes from HBR blogger Umair Haque: Obama’s Seven Lessons for Radical Innovators. I don’t agree with all of his points (Obama did not “minimize strategy,” he minimized tactics!) but I do commend Haque for his insights (see this post, for example, on why Obama is the Google of Politics.)
Bill Taylor has a fun post titled: How Obama Became CEO of the USA — and What It Means for CEOs Everywhere
in which he argues that “being different makes all the difference.”
John Quelch says it’s all about better marketing.
Barbara Kellerman argues that Obama is a superior manager.
Gill Corkindale calls Obama The World’s First 21st Century Leader
For Stew Friedman, it’s authenticity.
My own view is that Obama is a true leader. And what we witnessed was the birth of Politics 2.0.
And in the end, it’s still about results, and to that end, Obama has already taken the first step.
Go Barack!

Shaping Strategy in a World of Constant Disruption: How to Manage Your Business Ecosystem

In this month’s Harvard Business Review, authors John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison provide a road map for the daunting task of shaping strategy as technology-driven infrastructures constantly change.
The article is called: “Shaping Strategy in a World of Constant Disruption” and you can download it here (thanks Deloitte Consulting!) >>
In my view this is a very timely piece of thinking from my heroes JH3 and JSB (and Lang Davison). I’ll dig into it later this month on ecosystemwatch.com
Wait, there’s more. Check out the podcast >>

Online Selling: Procter & Gamble Goes Direct to Fight Private Labels?

Don’t look now, but P&G is trying some direct selling online.
From the Financial Times:

Procter & Gamble is testing its ability to use the internet to sell its toothpaste, household cleaners and nappies directly to US households, in a potential long-term strategic challenge to its retail partners.
…The move brings P&G into direct brand competition with its retailers, underlining the extent to which e-commerce is contributing to changes in the way the two sides have traditionally worked with each other.

OK. The site is called theEssentials.com, but so far it looks like they have very little traffic.
Is this how they intend to fight the private label war? I’ll talk about them later this month on ecosystemwatch.com

What Would Peter Drucker Do?

Looks like Rupert Murdoch’s WSJ is thinking along the same lines we are (for a few seconds at least).
They’ve gone an dug up an old article Peter Drucker wrote for them: Planning for Uncertainty.
Here are some of the key questions:
– …traditional planning asks, “What is most likely to happen?” Planning for uncertainty asks, instead, “What has already happened that will create the future?”
– “What do these accomplished facts mean for our business? What opportunities do they create? What threats? What changes do they demand — in the way the business is organized and run, in our goals, in our products, in our services, in our policies? And what changes do they make possible and likely to be advantageous?”
– “What changes in industry and market structure, in basic values (e.g., the emphasis on the environment), and in science and technology have already occurred but have yet to have full impact?”
– “What are the trends in economic and societal structure? And how do they affect our business?”
– “What is this company good at? What does it do well? What strengths, in other words, give it a competitive edge? Applied to what?”
He ends with a serious warning for the bean-counters:
There is, however, one condition: that the business create the resources of knowledge and of people to respond when opportunity knocks. This means developing a separate futures budget.
The 10% or 12% of annual expenditures needed to create and maintain the resources for the future — in research and technology, in market standing and service, in people and their development — must be put into a constant budget maintained in good years and bad. These are investments, even though accountants and tax collectors consider them operating expenses. They enable a business to make its future — and that, in the last analysis, is what planning for uncertainty means.

And don’t forget his advice for retail strategy >>

5 Questions about Strategy and Business Design

Now is a good time to ask yourself these five business design questions (ht to Oliver Wyman):
1. Who is the customer and what do we offer? Which customer segments should we serve, and what is our value proposition for each segment?
2. What is our profit model for each of our offerings?
3. What do we perform in-house and what do we outsource?
4. How do we build in strategic control? Is there a way to create sustainable differentiation?
5. How should we organize ourselves to make it happen? What is the right organizational architecture to execute the business for each segment?
You can download the business blueprint (registration required): level-one flowcharts of how to run a profitable, sustainable, online business.
1) Offer development process
2) Offer creation process
3) Sales process
4) Marketing process
5) Order fulfillment & support process
6) Financial process
7) Licensee certification process
8) Licensee business development process
9) Events process
10) Archival process

God is in the Process: The Legacy of Michael Hammer

I have to say I was shocked when I saw the news about Michael Hammer. He was just sixty. Goes to show you how precious every second is. It may be that they need to do some process re-engineering up in heaven. Maybe make it more customer friendly or something…

Down here on Earth, process re-engineering isn’t as fashionable as it used to be. And I wonder how many people got laid off because of Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution (Collins Business Essentials).

But Hammer was misunderstood. His ideas were abused by company executives and the management consulting industry. Today his ideas live on in the heads of IT nerds and companies like Zara.

Where do you (and your company) stand? Check out the maturity models he created:
1) for process maturity, and 2) for enterprise maturity.

Too bad we didn’t see the one on leadership maturity.

Here are some fun links:
Put Processes First: Make High Performance Possible Michael Hammer
Michael Hammer: A Tribute to the Guru of Operations Anand Raman
Remembering Michael Hammer Tom Davenport

In the end, process matters. Even our buddy Drucker acknowledged that.
BTW, the other process guru who is still (very) alive and kicking isTom Davenport.

Retail Strategy: Tips from Peter Drucker

One of the great things about the late Peter Drucker is that he can be summoned to solve just about any problem.
One of my clients is a web retailer. They’re having serious issues with “customer hesitancy.”
And of course the headlines are now full of bad news in retail.
So we had a long chat about customer hesitancy. What makes the customer hesitant? Is it really the news on TV? Is it the fact that they might be out of a job?
My first piece of advice to them was straight out of Drucker: Stop selling and start buying for the customer.
Are you buying for the customer? Really?
That line of reasoning led to these predictable questions: so exactly who is your customer? Are there segments you aren’t serving that you should? Are there segments you should stop wasting your time with?
We were able to go and look at their historic web-sales data (for the past two years down to the last two weeks) to find out who their customers really were. And surprise, there was no customer hesitancy there!
All they needed was to focus on the right segment. We changed the website to do just that.
Listen to good old (in this case a younger, “1.0 version”) Drucker:

Download the Blueprint: 10 Processes to Run Your Business

blueprint
Level-one flowcharts of how to run a profitable, sustainable, online business. Covers the following work processes:
1) Offer development process
2) Offer creation process
3) Sales process
4) Marketing process
5) Order fulfillment & support process
6) Financial process
7) Licensee certification process
8) Licensee business development process
9) Events process
10) Archival process
You’ll have to register for this one >>

Friedman versus Senge: The Race for the Green Business Bestseller

My opinion: Tom Friedman will win the bestseller race easily, but Peter Senge‘s book is more important. The good news? They’re both serious about business and sustainability.
Here’s Senge:

And here’s his book: The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals And Organizations Are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World
Check out this interview with Senge>>
And this download>>
And here’s Friedman’s book pitch:

His book: Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew America
His website>>
And finally, a little column from Friedman>>
Exxon, your days are numbered.

Shoe Circus: Gates and Seinfeld take on Google, Apple – er, Goople

Here’s Crispin Porter & Bogusky’s attempt to “bring back” Microsoft:

It’s the first in a series of ads designed to fight Apple’s “Mac vs. PC” comedy show. Will $300 million do the job?
C’mon Microsoft! You can’t let Apple do this to you:

The scary thing is there’s so much more.
The way I see it this isn’t about Vista at all. It’s about the next wave of competition, about how Microsoft will compete against Goople – Google apps on Apple hardware!

Nurturing Your Business Ecosystem: Lessons Learned from SAP

JH3 and JSB have written an insightful piece for BusinessWeek titled: How SAP Seeds Innovation: SAP’s collaborative Web sites and discussion forums give its customers ways to learn from SAP business partners as well as from each other.
So why does SAP succeed where others fail?
According to Hagel:
1) SAP generated its ecosystem, which consists of customers, business partners, experts and independent parties by addressing the needs of the participants

and
2) it focused on the needs of individuals, not just companies.
There you have it: people first.
Read the entire article >>

Can the U.S. Learn from Indian R&D?

Duke’s Vivek Wadhwa writes in BusinessWeek:
“…India is rapidly becoming a global R&D hub in several industries. Its scientists are doing sophisticated drug discovery for Big Pharma (BusinessWeek.com, 6/10/08). Its engineers are designing key components of jetliners for Boeing (BA) and Airbus; developing next-generation networking equipment for companies like Cisco Systems (CSCO); and building auto bodies, dashboards, and power trains for such vehicle manufacturers as General Motors (GM). Indian companies are also innovating for the Indian marketplace; witness the $2,500 car by Tata Motors (TTM).”
So how are they doing it?
Hint: it’s all about developing your company’s most valuable asset.

Watching Ecosystems: a blog about marketspace analytics

Announcing our new blog at www.ecosystemwatch.com >>
The idea is fairly simple: If you don’t understand the ecosystem you’re competing in, you can’t compete effectively…
The blog will cover the following topics:
– Blogosphere
– Branding Ecosystems
– Business Ecosystems
– Business Models
– Case Studies
– Disruption
– Ecosystem Maps
– Industry Ecosystems
– Influencers
– Innovation Ecosystems
– Political Ecosystems
– Product Ecosystems
– Social Networking
– Strategy
– Value-Networks
This is a natural offshoot of our Ecosystem Intelligence™ service; take a look…

How to Measure Innovation

In some companies, you’ll hear senior executives spout this tired mantra: “Innovation is everyone’s job.” When that happens, head for the exit.
Now, the British are going to tell us how to measure innovation. The National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts (NESTA), a nonprofit organization that promotes innovation, wants to create a new index, one that will be industry-specific… blah, blah, blah.
I agree with their premise that traditional methods of measuring innovation, such as the amount of money thrown at R&D, don’t tell the entire story.
But their idea of implementing an industry-based “peer review in which company executives both help to define the innovation indicators and rate each other” is a joke.
Let’s see. Let’s ask the CEOs of Exxon, Chevron, Shell ,and BP to rate their industry on innovative approaches to solving the energy problem. Not funny, is it?
Clayton Christensen says the same thing in this article about creating new value networks.
So what should we measure? How about looking at results?
Can we identify disruptive entrants in an existing industry ecosystem? (Shameless plug: yes, we can – with Ecosystem IQ)
Hey, at least the British are trying. Better than our lame Department of Commerce.
BTW, BusinessWeek does have a Global Innovation Index worth looking at, but again, they’re looking at the establishment, the industry giants that are investing in innovation.
What I want to see is the game-changers. Where’s the next successful car company coming from? Is it Tata or Tesla?

Active Inertia: Why Good Companies Go Bad

The Economist has just begun a series on “big ideas” in management thinking. These may be the buzzwords of the past, but many of them are worth understanding.
Active Inertia. That’s how successful companies (and governments) lose their way. Here’s how Don Sull explains his idea:
My research suggests that companies fall prey to active inertia—responding to even the most disruptive market shifts by accelerating activities that succeeded in the past. When the world changes, organizations trapped in active inertia do more of the same. A little faster perhaps or tweaked at the margin, but basically the same old same old. Managers often equate inertia with inaction, like the tendency of a billiard ball at rest to remain immobile. But executives in failing companies unleash a flurry of initiatives—indeed they typically work more frenetically than their counterparts at competitors which adapt more effectively. Organizations trapped in active inertia resemble a car with its back wheels stuck in a rut. Managers step on the gas. Rather than escape the rut, they only dig themselves in deeper.
What Sull says is that we get trapped in our assumptions in the following areas:
Strategic frames: What we see when we look at the world, including definition of industry, relevant competitors and how to create value.
Processes: How we do things around here entailing both informal and formal routines.
Resources: Tangible and intangible assets that we control which help us compete, such as brand, technology, real estate, expertise, etc.
Relationships: Established links with external stakeholders including investors, technology partners or distributors
Values: Beliefs that inspire, unify and identify us.
So we just dig a deeper hole.
How do we get out of the mess? It starts with a sense of urgency.
By the way, this idea of active inertia applies at the individual level as well. How many of us go through life doing the same thing over and over?

Greenwashing is the New Red, White, and Blue

How do you motivate your employees in this, the age of cynicism?
Instead of handing out Chinese-made flag pins to all their employees (yes, this actually happens) companies can start by supporting a few good causes.
The Economist has a nice write-up on companies taking this leap. A few examples:
IKEA, the world’s largest furniture-maker, joins forces with Rainforest Alliance and WWF to promote forest certification in China by the Forest Stewardship Council
Marriott International teams up with Conservation International and the Brazilian state of Amazonas to protect a big area of Amazon rainforest.
Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer, set up an ambitious programme in 2005 with the long-term aim of becoming a zero-waste, renewably powered enterprise.
OK. Does this mean that business is finally waking up to do the right thing?

Not exactly.

The real danger with the “greening of business” is hypocrisy, i.e. greenwashing:

So if your business is going to go green (and it should), make sure you don’t do it as a PR stunt.
If you do, your company just might end up here >>

Lessons Learned: Branding and Online Communities

Back in 2000 I was the leading an interesting experiment at one of the world’s largest software companies. The idea was simply this: if we build “communities of interest” around a specific topic (e.g. “database management,” or “innovation,” or “quality of experience”) we’ll be able to attract a significant number of our “target” audience and convert them to paying customers over time.
In a year and a half, we built seven distinct communities each supported by an ecosystem of vendors and partners. For four years we tried to make these communities work, and we did, with various levels of success. Along the way we learned several key lessons and I mention them here because while they seem basic, few companies ever seem to get them right:
Communities build Brand Equity
Unaided brand recognition for our company went from 12% to 84% within two years. Our “agency” did the survey and couldn’t believe the findings. Like most agencies, this one was focused on producing “creative” work rather than figuring out how to be useful to the consumer. Of all the sites we built, this was the only one which received “full funding” and was strongly supported ($) by the sponsoring business unit. It became a major hub in the ecosystem we were competing in, and we literally had about 50% of the “target audience” “opted-in” to our email newsletter. Furthermore, in terms of online referrals, this community accounted for as much as 40% (yes, forty percent) of referrals to the online store.
Communities are Self Segmenting
We learned we didn’t have to target or segment anyone. The content did the work for us. Because each community was “vertical” and concentrated on a specific subject, the only visitors we got were people interested in the topics we wrote about. In fact, the some of our more successful sites became the hub in the marketspace we were targeting.
Stop Selling, Start Learning
We didn’t push products on the sites. In fact, we tried hard not to sell. Instead, we focused on educational content from the world’s leading experts. The result, we had “stickiness” numbers even I couldn’t believe. On our best site, the average user spent over an hour per visit. And this number held up every month, for three years in a row. While we tried our best to teach, we also spent a considerable amount of time learning. I’d spend afternoons poring over site statistics – trying to figure out what was going on.
The 90/10 Rule applies
As we studied visitor behavior, we looked at content and author popularity, the clickthroughs and conversion rates, and resilience – which articles or discussions stood the test of time. Surprisingly, we noted that 5% of our authors drove 95% of our traffic. And 5% of our readers drove 95% of our sales. This was the pareto-principle on steroids (Richard Koch was right)!
Communities Drive Demand Generation
10X better than traditional online techniques like SEO and PPC. Our cost per lead was so low, our EVP of Sales couldn’t believe it. He became one of our biggest supporters.
Corporate Marketing is the Enemy
Don’t ever sell “communities” to a marketing department that thinks in terms of quarters and campaigns. As our communities took off, we experienced all sorts of difficulties, not from the outside, but rather from the corporate marketing staff. My boss believed that companies must drive traffic to their branded company URL, and not to a myriad of niche sites with funky names like linuxvalue.com (the site no longer exists, but it did work). Luckily my boss got zapped before I did, and I was able to keep the experiment going over four years and three different corporate marketing regimes. To this day, they don’t get it.
Forget the Wisdom of the Crowd, Focus on Thought Leadership
Communities are not necessarily social networks. We learned early on to allow the leading experts in the field to write about their pet peeves and passions. Sometimes they would come to “virtual blows” – one expert against the other – each presenting their views with wit and learning (and the occasional threat).
Manage the Ecosystem
After a year of slogging, we suddenly noticed that we didn’t have to worry about keywords or search engines ever again. We had become Google favorites. Almost anything we wrote about on any of the sites rose to #1 in Google and stayed there for years. Why? Because we had built a strong enough ecosystem- not a business ecosystem, mind you, but a consumer ecosystem. Our readers loved us. The experts loved us. Google loved us. What a game! All we had to do was focus on quality content. Our ecosystem became impenetrable. We had built a firewall against all competition. One example is particularly striking. Even after we stopped updating the site in question, we remained at #1 in Google for a highly competitive key phrase – not for a month or two, but for straight three years, after we had stopped touching the site at all!
There were a few more lessons we learned as well, but I think I’ve done enough jabbering for today. The end game for me was Double Loop Marketing™ and Ecosystem Intelligence™ – both direct offshoots of my time spent figuring out how to make communities succeed.

Viewer-Driven TV Programming – Is PBS serious?

I think it’s a nice gesture that PBS is asking viewers for programming suggestions:
What would your prime time lineup look like? Would you emphasize news and public affairs programming over science and nature content? Would you make changes to existing shows? What kinds of new series and specials would you bring to the public airwaves?
When they meet in Palm Desert, CA, the executives should take a look at the suggestions, but I feel they should talk to each other as well.
Why? Because there are serious limitations to heeding the Wisdom of the Crowd.
I blogged about Nick Carr‘s take on this subject a while back: “What crowds are good for is producing average results that are not subject to the biases and other quirks of human minds.”
The PBS bigwigs have forgotten their mission. (Maybe not, since a lot of them are now Republicans; I have to confess, when I heard about that I was sure we were soon all going to be watching infomercials on PBS 24/7).
So let’s remind them what public television stands for. What’s the brand personality they need to be faithful to?
Seth Godin weighs in on this issue with a brilliant post about the purpose of the New York Times. Same deal for PBS.
So let’s ask: What’s important? What’s true?
Big opportunity for big stories, PBS. Go where the corporate media can’t go:
News, Education, and the Arts. And don’t forget to add “Global Warming” as a new category.
PBS, you knew that once.
Look what happened to Ted Koppel and Nightline. Or David Brinkley’s This Week. I’ll Fly Away. That’s commercial television. PBS, please don’t go there.
One more thing: make sure every show is archived online for viewing over the Internet. All the way back to the very beginning of PBS (including Mr. Rodgers’ Neighborhood). That would be a real public service. Heck, put ’em all on YouTube.
I’m a fan of customer feedback, but I’m a bigger fan of the customer experience.
Don’t mess this up, PBS.

Why did Tata buy Range Rover and Jaguar?


Interesting analyses. We are going to see many more such mergers.
India and China are buying up brands.
We are going to see many more such mergers. These are “learning-acquisitions.”
Let’s see what Tata can teach Jaguar, and vice-versa. Value-engineering? Haven’t heard that terms since the 1980s…