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Girl Scouts: Sell This!

One of my pet peeves with the Girl Scouts of America is their exploitation of children:
“…they have to sell 40 boxes of cookies at $3.00 apiece just to make $20.00. The other $2.50 goes to the Girl Scout Organization.”
What a rip-off.
Instead of selling cookies, the Girl Scouts troops should be selling these. And keeping the PCs.
Why can’t www.laptop.org donate or sell PCs to poor schools in the US as well as the rest of the world? C’mon St. Nicholas (Negroponte)!

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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 >>

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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 >>

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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
 >>

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Tom Friedman: “Steve Jobs – want to run G.M. for a year?”

Tom Friedman made me laugh today:
“…somebody ought to call Steve Jobs, who doesn’t need to be bribed to do innovation, and ask him if he’d like to do national service and run a car company for a year. I’d bet it wouldn’t take him much longer than that to come up with the G.M. iCar.”
The rest of his column is a bit more serious. But it’s dead on!

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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!

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Michael Porter: Why America Needs an Economic Strategy

“The stark truth is that the U.S. has no long-term economic strategy—no coherent set of policies to ensure competitiveness over the long haul. Strategy embodies clear priorities, based on understanding the strengths we need to preserve and the weaknesses that threaten our prosperity the most. Strategy addresses what to do, but also what not to do. In dealing with a crisis, experience teaches us that steps to address the immediate problem must support a long-term strategy. Yet it is far from clear that we are taking the steps most important to America’s long-term economic prosperity.”
That’s the Portermeister in BusinessWeek.
What he’s saying is Vote Obama 🙂

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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 >>

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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

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SNL Disaster: Sarah Palin Mocks Herself

This is truly amazing. The folks at SNL get VP candidate Sarah Palin to applaud a song which rips her to shreds… What was the McCain campaign thinking? Total and utter lack of judgment on their part.
Watch as SNL schools the McCain campaign:

Brilliant work by SNL. They get the ratings and trash the Republicans.

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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 >>

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Retail Strategy in a Downturn: Pay Your Vendors Fast (like T.J. Maxx)

In BusinessWeek:
Industry observers say that while those retailers can take 60 to 90 days or more to settle up, TJX typically pays within 30. These days, that’s a critical selling point both to vendors, who are more concerned about finding funds to buy raw materials and pay expenses, and to the financers who act as middlemen in many of the deals. It could give TJX—which also owns discounters Marshalls and HomeGoods—an added advantage in getting a wider selection of items.
Makes sense. Can’t sell something that’s not on the shelf, Drucker used to say…
Read the article here>>
There’s another very good reason to pay quickly: goodwill.
Your suppliers will take an extra step or two for you if they know they can count on you. This “trust” makes a giant difference in execution.
There’s a software company I know which used to delay its vendor payments as much as possible as part of its strategy. While it may have gained a few bucks in capital, it lost in terms of responsiveness. Big time. Vendors would move extremely slowly to deliver value. It was frustrating on both sides. And all because a few “brilliant” bean-counters thought they had found a way to squeeze a few more pennies into the corporate treasury.

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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:

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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 >>

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What Works in a Downturn: Purpose-Branding or Cause-Marketing

Despite the downturn, there is evidence that consumers are interested in “purpose branding.”
That’s the spin from Procter & Gamble’s Jim Stengel who (surprise, surprise) is leaving P&G at the end of the month to join a “purpose branding” consultancy.
Back-up data: In a study released this month, 26% of consumers expect companies to give more support to causes and nonprofits in an economic downturn, while 52% expect companies to maintain existing programs. Another 79% of consumers said if price and quality were similar, they would switch to a brand associated with a good cause.
OK, I’ll buy it.
And if your company is looking to do some cause-related branding, here’s a cool green company you should team up with: The Solar Electric Light Fund >>

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Downturn 2008: Harvard Business Review’s Survival Guide

And now, a survival guide from HBR.
My favorite entries:
– Why Entrepreneurs Love a Downturn
– How to Market in a Recession
– Staying Green in a Tough Economic Climate
– Three Steps to Innovating in Struggling Industries
– America’s Addiction and the New Economics of Strategy
– Beyond the Banking Crisis: A Strategy Crisis
– Hard Times Demand Teamwork — Not an MVP
Non sequitur: What is the difference between Palin and a Muslim fundamentalist? Lipstick.

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What Obama Can Teach You About Your Business

This article really is a bit too skewed on the “social networking” side of things, but I do agree w/ what John Della Volpe is saying, that Obama’s “blue-ocean strategy” to get the youth involved (beginning with Iowa), and his brilliant use of technology and social networking to attract, engage, and involve people in the campaign has made all the difference.
But Obama can teach business a lot more than Web 2.0.
His decision-making is classic Peter Drucker. According to campaign adviser Susan Rice:
“He listens to various viewpoints. He elicits dissenting views. He weighs those rationally and pragmatically. But then he tends to make a relatively swift and clear decision.”
Which makes Obama an analytical decision-maker with a talent for delivering inspiring speeches.
Leadership 2.0 is what we call it.
ALSO:
McCain, on the other hand, is reckless. And his incompetent decision to choose a clearly incompetent Palin as his replacement is an insult to the office of the President and the American people. He just doesn’t have a clue!

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Piracy and Cannibalism: Do Digital Downloads Reduce Revenue?

economist_digitaldownloads.jpg
From The Economist:
In 2007 digital downloads accounted for 15% of global music sales compared with almost nothing in 2003. But the outlook for the music industry is worrying. Despite the growing market for digital downloads, music sales have declined over the past four years and are set to continue to dwindle, partly as a result of piracy.
BTW, does anyone really believe that Sarah Palin reads The Economist?

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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.

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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!

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Leadership Assessment: What John McCain can learn from GE

Does anyone believe that a Fortune 500 company would pick Sarah Palin as their CEO?
When Jack Welch transformed GE, he introduced several new criteria for evaluating executive leadership and performance. His successor, Jeffrey Immelt went through an exhaustive succession planning (er, vetting) process to replace him.
Here’s a look at GE’s leadership assessment matrix. The key attributes are:
– Vision
– Customer / Quality Focus
– Integrity
– Accountability / Commitment
– Communication / Influence
– Shared Ownership / Boundaryless
– Team Builder / Empowerment
– Knowledge / Expertise / Intellect
– Initiative / Speed
– Global Mind-set
Not bad. Does your company look at leadership this way?
Here are the details:
Vision
– Has developed and communicated a clear, simple, customer-focused Vision / direction for the organization.
– Forward-thinking, stretches horizons, challenges imaginations.
– Inspires and energizes others to commit to Vision. Captures minds. Leads by example.
– As appropriate, updates Vision to reflect constant and accelerating change impacting the business.
Customer / Quality Focus
– Listens to customer and assigns the highest priority to customer satisfaction, including internal customers.
– Inspires and demonstrates a passion for excellence in every aspect of work.
– Strives to fulfill commitment to Quality in total product / service offering.
– Lives Customer Service and creates service mind-set throughout organization.
Integrity
– Maintains unequivocal commitment to honesty / truth in every facet of behavior.
– Follows through on commitments; assumes responsibility for own mistakes.
– Practices absolute conformance with company policies embodying GEI&PS commitment to ethical conduct.
– Actions and behaviors are consistent with words. Absolutely trusted by others.
Accountability / Commitment
– Sets and meets aggressive commitments to achieve business objectives.
– Demonstrates courage / self-confidence to stand up for the beliefs, ideas, – Fair and compassionate yet willing to make difficult decisions.
– Demonstrates uncompromising responsibility for preventing harm to the environment
Communication / Influence
– Communicates in open, candid, clear, complete, and consistent manner – invites response / dissent.
– Listens effectively and probes for new ideas.
– Uses facts and rational arguments to influence and persuade.
– Breaks down barriers and develops influential relationships across teams, functions, and layers.
Shared Ownership / Boundaryless
– Self-confidence to share information across traditional boundaries and be open to new ideas.
– Encourages / promotes shared ownership for Team Vision and goals.
– Trusts others; encourages risk taking and boundaryless behavior.
– Champions Work-Out as a vehicle for everyone to be heard. Open to ideas from anywhere.
Team Builder / Empowerment
– Selects talented people; provides coaching and feedback to develop team members to fullest potential.
– Delegates whole task; empowers team to maximize effectiveness. Is personally a Team Player.
– Recognizes and rewards achievement. Creates positive / enjoyable work environment.
– Fully utilizes diversity of team members (cultural, race, gender) to achieve business success.
Knowledge / Expertise / Intellect
– Possesses and readily shares functional / technical knowledge and expertise. Constant interest in learning.
– Demonstrates broad business knowledge / perspective with cross-functional / multicultural awareness.
– Makes good decisions with limited data. Applies intellect to the fullest.
– Quickly sorts relevant from irrelevant information, grasp essentials of complex issues and initiates action.
Initiative / Speed
– Creates real and positive change. Sees change as an Opportunity.
– Anticipates problems and initiates new and better ways of doing things.
– Hates / avoids / eliminates “bureaucracy” and strives for brevity, simplicity, clarity.
– Understands and uses speed as a competitive advantage.
Global Mind-set
– Demonstrates global awareness / sensitivity and is comfortable building diverse / global teams.
– Values and promotes full utilization of global and work force diversity.
– Considers the global consequences of every decision. Proactively seeks global knowledge.
– Treats everyone with dignity, trust, and respect.
So, how do you measure up?
To me this is another dimension on the Ram Charan / Ben Franklin leadership model I blogged about a while back.
And now, sit back and listen carefully:

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Andrew J. Bacevich on The Limits of Power


Andrew J. Bacevich — Professor of International Relations at Boston University, retired Army colonel, and West Point graduate — joins Bill Moyers on the JOURNAL to encourage viewers to take a step back and connect the dots between U.S. foreign policy, consumerism, politics, and militarism.
Wake up, everybody.