Why does shop.org do something like this? So they can sell more stuff.
Read the BusinessWeek article “Cyber Monday, Marketing Myth.” Well done, BusinessWeek.
But the Best Buy site was down:
Tom Davenport on Personal Knowledge Management
Says TD: “Most interventions to improve performance in business are at the organizational or process level, but it doesn’t have to be that way. We can also improve individual capabilities. Ultimately, knowledge worker performance comes down to the behaviors of individual knowledge workers. If we improve their individual abilities to create, acquire, process and use knowledge, we are likely to improve the performance of the processes they work on, and the organizations they work for.”
Right on! Read this insightful post on Tom Davenport’s blog- BabsonKnowledge.org.
Reputation Management: Doug Smith’s Recommendations to Harrisinteractive
For several years, Harrisinteractive of the Harris polling company has done an annual survey of the ‘reputation quotient’ of what it calls the 60 ‘most visible’ companies. The survey asks respondents to evaluate companies against 20 attributes ranging from social responsibility to financial performance to product quality. Each of the twenty can earn a top score of 7 and a low of 1.
Here’s what Doug Smith thinks…
Country Branding: The Futurebrand Version
Why do so many PR and branding companies have the worst websites? Because they don’t understand how branding works online.
In spite of their website, they’ve done some interesting work at Futurebrand. I’m talking about their Country Brand Index.
Apparently Italy ranks as the top overall destination, according to a global survey that identifies countries as brands… Australia and the U.S. take the second and third positions.
China is the “most improved” country brand, the U.S. is “best country brand for business travel” and Italy is the “best country brand for art and culture.”
“If a ‘brand’ is defined as an experience, then some of the world’s most powerful and recognizable brands should be countries. The challenge the industry faces is that it must move away from the traditional reactive and tactical marketing approaches and instead, create and deliver an overall brand experience that drives sales and turns visitors into country-brand evangelists,” says Rene A. Mack of Weber Shandwick, the agency involved in the creation of the index.
He’s right and wrong. Your travel experience in a country is not the same as the country’s brand. These days its important how you act in public. Like children, some countries behave better than others. Some are unruly, some loud, some mild-mannered…
A better survey is the Anholt-GMI Nation Brands Index. I talked about it in a previous post – The Rise and Fall of Brand America.
Also: see what Peter Drucker thinks. You have to listen to the whole thing!
Shooting Birds or Catching Fish: Dunk on Branding
William Dunk gets it.
Here’s a letter he posted on his Global Province site back in 2004.
“Basically there are a couple of ways of making sales. Either you shoot them down or they come to you. For most of the mass market era, we took a shotgun, cost be damned, and pumped lead into the skies, hoping to knock as many pigeons—i.e., customers—down as possible. Right now, as we transition out of the mass era, we are using rifles, and assuming that with careful targeting, we can hit a choice quail, duck, or wild turkey on the wing, and then send a bird dog out to retrieve. The idea is to hit many less prospects, but to hit the choice ones that count. You should understand that any form of marketing that has targeting in its name is expensive and probably a poor return on investment. Nonetheless, targeting is the craze of this moment.
“But then there’s catching fish. We put a worm or fly down in the water and wait for the fish to come to us. Stream fishing. It’s more subtle. Less energetic. We use the inquisitive hunger of fish to lure them into our clutches. Sight and sound and touch are compounded. This is allure. It’s very, very related to “word of mouth,” which, at the end of the day, is the most effective form of marketing.
“We think longer term that it’s time to lay down lures in the water. That will drive companies to provide horribly accurate product information that tells the user how to get good results at low cost from a product, even suggesting alternatives to their own that may work better for some applications. Straight poop becomes the strongest form of advertising.”
He’s describing double-loop marketing… read the article.
Using Cheerleaders to Sell Drugs
“Exaggerated motions, exaggerated smiles, exaggerated enthusiasm – they learn those things and they can get people to do what they want.” – LYNN WILLIAMSON, an adviser at the University of Kentucky, on why so many former cheerleaders are hired as sales representatives for pharmaceutical companies.
This article in the NYTimes says that drug companies hire “sexy drug representatives as a variation on the seductive inducements like dinners, golf outings and speaking fees that pharmaceutical companies have dangled to sway doctors to their brands.”
“In a crowded field of 90,000 drug representatives, where individual clients wield vast prescription-writing influence over patients’ medication, who better than cheerleaders to sway the hearts of the nation’s doctors, still mostly men.”
“But pharmaceutical companies deny that sex appeal has any bearing on hiring. “Obviously, people hired for the work have to be extroverts, a good conversationalist, a pleasant person to talk to; but that has nothing to do with looks, it’s the personality,” said Lamberto Andreotti, the president of worldwide pharmaceuticals for Bristol-Myers Squibb.”
Right.
I’m comforted to know that our doctors, with all their years of “education,” are swayed so easily… Sex still sells. Maybe we should use cheerleaders as environmental lobbyists…
“Competing on Analytics” – Tom Davenport and friends
Competing on Analytics is a Babson Executive Education report by Tom Davenport, Don Cohen and Al Jacobson.
The report describes the emergence of a new form of competition based on the extensive use of analytics, data, and fact-based decision making. The analytics— quantitative or statistical models to analyze business problems—may be applied to a variety of business problems, including customer management, supply chains, and financial performance. The research assessed 32 firms with regard to their orientation to analytics; about one-third were classified as fully engaged in analytically oriented strategies. Both demand and supply factors for analytical competition are described. Of the two, demand factors are the more difficult to create. The presence of one or more committed senior executives is a primary driver of analytical competition.
Registration is required for download, but it’s worth it.
John Byrne on Drucker: “The Man Who Invented Management”
A human look at Drucker’s contributions from John Byrne and Lindsey Gerdes at BW:
— It was Drucker who introduced the idea of decentralization — in the 1940s — which became a bedrock principle for virtually every large organization in the world.
— He was the first to assert — in the 1950s — that workers should be treated as assets, not as liabilities to be eliminated.
— He originated the view of the corporation as a human community — again, in the 1950s — built on trust and respect for the worker and not just a profit-making machine, a perspective that won Drucker an almost godlike reverence among the Japanese.
— He first made clear — still the ’50s — that there is “no business without a customer,” a simple notion that ushered in a new marketing mind-set.
— He argued in the 1960s — long before others — for the importance of substance over style, for institutionalized practices over charismatic, cult leaders.
— And it was Drucker again who wrote about the contribution of knowledge workers — in the 1970s — long before anyone knew or understood how knowledge would trump raw material as the essential capital of the New Economy.
read it here
Check out this very, very interesting podcast… John Byrne talks about his first meeting with Peter Drucker and his wife Doris at the YMCA in Estes Park, on how Drucker saw “business as an opportunity to build community” – the problem of executive pay – and much, much more.
Warren Bennis: “Peter Drucker, how do you learn?”
Answer: ” By listening, only to myself!”
Great podcast!
Koppel Steps Down: The End for Nightline?
During his 42 years at ABC News and 26-year run on “Nightline,” Ted Koppel has seen — and reported — it all.
As he prepared to anchor his last edition of “Nightline” Tuesday night, Koppel spoke about his experiences as an anchor and reporter for the show long regarded as the smartest news program on TV.
Read the ABC Interview here.
Note that it is filed under “entertainment.” Prediction: Nightline is finished.
The new format stinks. Since when is “less news, more crap” a formula for success? Oh I forgot, this is US TV- i.e. “entertainment.”
Note to the BBC: you can now safely take over the news marketspace in the US.
Neil French: The Strategy Interview
November 2005 – Strategy Magazine
One is enough
Q’s and cocktails with…Neil French, outgoing worldwide CD, WPP Group
by Lisa D’Innocenzo
By now, you surely must have heard about the Neil French kerfuffle. The short version: Last month, he resigned his post at WPP because of reaction to controversial comments he made about female CDs during a Toronto event, organized by ad site ihaveanidea.org.
Strategy interviewed French a day before that fateful night and felt he made some salient points about the state of the industry, as well as what it takes to be brilliant. So, despite the fact that he called said reporter “Sweetpea,” we thought this was still worth a read.
LD: What do you think of the state of the ad industry?
NF: What in Canada? Please don’t ask me, because I don’t know. I could have got somebody to brief me about Canadian advertising. That would have been wrong, because it’s like a politician being told what to say. I don’t do that shit. I’ve never been to Canada before – what the hell would I know about Canada? I like the place – I love the weather. [Spoken on a 28 degree day in late September.]
LD: How about overall?
NF: There’s this hysteria on at the moment about how television is dead and it’s all going to interactive. That’s such bollocks. Yes, in the Western World there are a lot of computers out there and interactive thingy-bobs. But actually 90% of the population of the earth is not sitting in front of an Apple tonight. You go to some huge shack city in Brazil, or Thailand, and that light from the shack is a television. Why is everybody panicking? I remember when radio was dead. I remember when newspapers were dead. They’re fine. Now television is dead. No it’s bloody not. It’s just a lot of inept people who think that with the next thing, there might be some good ads. There won’t be of course, because they are genetically inept.
LD: What do you think of the fact that more money is going into interactive then?
NF: If you put everything into mobile, it’s going to piss people off much more than the television ads. Mostly mobile’s used by kids. They are going to make the phone calls, they are going to text their mates, they do not want to be interrupted by some jerk who wants to sell them a soft drink. So this is more likely to burn out very quickly. They will watch the stuff they want to see, and that’s when you get them. Yes, TiVo can make sure you don’t watch the ads, but if it’s a really good ad that appears during the moto racing or the soccer, you’ll leave it on to hope the ad comes on. I’ve heard people say this: “I love this one. I’m not going out for a pee.” It’s human nature. If the media buyer’s clever enough, it’s going to always be in the same program. Having your ad liked by the consumer, that’s the Holy Grail. No more conversation needed on that subject; move on.
LD: So what does it take to make a good ad?
NF: Talk to people. That’s all it is. When Winston Churchill said: “We shall fight them on the beaches,” he was talking to one bloke. Every single person in his little house in the middle of England saw himself standing shoulder to shoulder with Winston, with a pitchfork in his hand on the seashore. And when Hitler said: “We’re going to take over the world; we’ve had a rough deal,” every soldier at Nuremberg, said: “He’s talking to me, and I must not let him down.” So good or evil, the great communicators talk to one person. That’s what advertising does – I’m talking to you, this is the right car for you, or beer, or insurance company, or whatever the hell it is. Only for you. Luckily, there are millions of people like you and they will all buy it, but you don’t say that in the ad. There’s no you plural in advertising, it’s you singular.
LD: How come more advertisers don’t get that?
NF: Because 95% of the people in this business are buffoons. They’re clowns. The creatives blame the clients and the suits, and that’s only because the suits frequently come into advertising because they couldn’t get into banking or retail, so you get an awful lot of those. But the client has every right to make his own decision on his own product. It is our responsibility to explain to him why this will work better than that, and if we fail to do that, we don’t deserve to do good advertising.
LD: What work have you seen recently that gets it right?
NF: I have to bring this one up, because it’s a great example of talking to the audience. It was an ad [I did] for [Panadol] in China. They researched aspirins and the Chinese got a bit upset that it said: “Take two,” because they thought: “It seems like such a waste, using all these aspirins up.” So they brought out the single pill.
If you want to talk to people, tell them something that’s relevant to them, and then twist it in the direction of your product. So I wrote the line of “One is enough,” and the picture was a picture of George Bush and George Bush. It was huge.
Next year’s big winner is going to be the Big Ad from Australia [for Carlton Draught]. It is the heaviest irony possibly ever used in advertising and utterly hilarious. If you look at it and deconstruct it, it’s the perfect ad for beer, without having to show a lot of people in the public going “yo-ho-ho.”
LD: Why do so many ads in categories like beer look the same?
NF: Why? I’ll tell you why, and this is where the client is to blame. He sees an ad, and says: “Oh, that’s good, can we have one like that?” And it’s the very thing he shouldn’t say. He should say: “Can we have one not like that.” Otherwise, how can a consumer, who doesn’t really care, ever differentiate? The client’s problem is only that his widget means to him his house, his wife, their kids, their education, their retirement and his funeral. Whereas to anyone in the street, it doesn’t come in the top million of things to worry about. Our job is to say: “This might be irrelevant, this widget,” but of course the client’s saying “No, no it’s really important; this is the best widget in the world.” But actually, they don’t care, mate. All we can say is: “When you need a widget, we do good ones.” So our job is to bridge the gap between the client’s enthusiasm and the audience’s apathy.
LD: How hard is that to do?
NF: It can be extremely difficult. The whole trick is to explain gently to the client why this is so. There are stupid people, but generally speaking the guy that runs the client is highly intelligent and highly motivated and a bit of a pirate. You don’t get to run a big brewery or big car company without being a little ballsy. Unfortunately for the hewers of wood and fetchers of water, further down the hierarchy, their interest is keeping their job.
I can’t remember a single occasion I’ve sold a decent campaign to anyone but the top guy. I did a campaign for Martel brandy, which was long copy and nobody had ever done long copy for brandy before. People down the line weren’t sure about it, but I made them let me present it to Edgar Bronfman, who in those days was the head of Seagram’s. The suits put me up front with great trepidation and I explained the ad. Edgar got it before I explained it to him. He understood the whole concept. He said: “Yeah, that’s great. We’ll go there. Looks like nothing we’ve ever seen before.” All the racks of suits sighed with relief because they didn’t have to make any decisions. At the end, he walked all the way down to the far end of the table, and said: “Neil, when these guys screw this up, you call me.” And I said: “You mean if?” And he said: “No, I mean when.”
LD: Are presidents getting more involved in marketing?
NF: No. I wish they bloody did. The only benefit of being old and wizened, like myself, is I can generally see the top man. Because I’ve been around forever, longer than God. The guy they want to see is the superstar, somebody like Bogusky, or an old bozo like me.
LD: How do you convince marketers to take a risk?
NF: Something I say to clients a lot is: “Are you actually just spending this money to mark time, or do you really want to make a difference? And how much of a difference do you want to make specifically? How much do you want sales to go up? How much can you supply if this was successful?” Ask all those questions and then you can say: “Now I know how brave you’re going to be. Not at all or very.” And of course, all bravery is risky, and so is safety.
LD: When do you know you can’t work with a marketer?
NF: There are three things important when running an ad agency. Someone called it the three F’s: fun, funds and fame. If a client gives you money and fame, that’s great. If he gives you fun and fame, but not much money, that’s still great. If he gives you lots of money and lots of fun, that’s ok. But if there’s no money in it, and no fun, but it will make you famous, you have to think about it. If it’s just fun, then you should have left years ago. One is bad. Two is ok, three is unbearably wonderful. After all, it is your life. The client doesn’t own you; you’re not a slave; you can say uncle.
LD: Why are boutique agencies becoming increasingly popular?
NF: The boutiques are attractive to big clients because they have a personal stake in the success of this relationship. The client joins and asks a smaller agency to help them in the knowledge that there might be a few moments of stress in this relationship, but in the end they will succeed. These are the mistresses, not the wives. The mistresses get the jewelry, the wives get the washing machine. It’s sad but true.
I was once talking to a boss of another very, very big agency. And I said: “You’ve had these clients so long. How do you do it?” He said: “Because they can’t be bothered to fire us.” It’s too much hassle.
LD: Like a divorce?
NF: Absolutely. “God, this is a problem. Oh, well, stick with it. It could be worse, not much, but it could be worse.” How sad is that? There comes a time, where you’re going to say: “Actually, screw this.” Or go get yourself a mistress, for just part of the time. And that’s what these big clients do. “We’re tied up to the teeth with these people, but I hate the bloody work, so I’m going to get a babe, and go out to dinner with a babe a lot, which will be great. It’s much more fun, makes us feel good, and hey, then we’ve got to get back to the sodding wife again.”
There will be more and more boutiques. There was a point where it was just about the big, big blocks taking over, but then the big, big blocks [started] buying the boutiques. Why do they buy the boutiques? Not for the money they’re making. They buy them to give themselves a certain sexiness – a nice set of legs, or high heels.
LD: A boob job?
NF: A boob job! Very good. Absolutely. That’s exactly it. Let’s stick them on to the front and it looks like we have big boobs. It doesn’t work.
LD: Does it help to have an ego in the ad business?
NF: I taught myself self confidence in my early teens. I was very shy. Pain and agony, and beating down embarrassment, teaching myself not to blush and all those awful things. Ego is really: “Do you really believe in yourself?”
[In Canada], there’s a cringe factor. There’s the permanent apology. I mean, I love the fact that people on the street are all saying “sorry” all the time. But, come on guys. Politeness is great, but sometimes it’s not said in a politeness way, as much as a “Please don’t hit me” way. That’s sad. I remember a young guy, saying: “You’re an egomaniac. You’re all ego and no talent.” That may be true. I said: “Do you have an ego?” “No,” he says. “Do you bathe? Then you have an ego. You care about what people think about you. You take a shower, you care.”
On Drucker: John Hagel, Tom Peters, William Dunk
Here are more views on Drucker from some very smart people:
>> John Hagel on his Edgeperspectives Blog:
Drucker’s Gone
“I am laid up with the flu so I am still having trouble processing the reality that Drucker’s gone. Drucker was an iconoclast who lived on the edge throughout his life. Prolific until the very end of a long life (he was 95 when he passed away last Friday), he always sought to move beyond established boundaries, believing that they limit the potential for insight and understanding…” Read the post >>
>> Tom Peters, in his “Dispatches from the New World of Work” blog:
Peter F. Drucker: Right Man for His/Our Times
“…Peter Drucker did arguably (1) “invent” modern management as we now think of it; (2) give the study and craft of management-as-profession credibility and visibility, even though biz schools like Harvard had been around for a long time; and (3) provide a (the first?) comprehensive toolkit-framework for addressing and even mastering the problems of emergent enterprise complexity…” More >>
>> William Dunk at Global Province:
Death at Claremont.
“The ultimate prophet of profit, Peter Drucker died last Friday, his mind churning to the end. He had spent his last years in residence at Claremont, having made his early imprint at New York University with Juran, Deming, and Feigenbaum, and as one of these four horsemen helped remake Japan’s economy after the war. Standard reading in business schools and corporate suites, his books turned heads from here to Tokyo. Compared to him, all the gurus out of McKinsey and the business schools have always seemed to be pretty tame stuff…” Read more >>
BTW, I’m amazed at the response my Drucker cartoons are getting. It seems like the “community of Drucker fans” is alive and well.
Do you Speak Soccer?
Emerson Ferreira da Rosa in the Economist:
I am increasingly aware of how football has become an effective and universally known “language” that can project images of pure sport, beautiful play and enjoyment: a “language” that is used and appreciated all over the world. I am amazed at the number of dads who play football with their kids in Central Park on Sunday morning. In the United States soccer is starting to compete with baseball, American football and basketball. There is also a “desire for football” in China, in Japan—where Juventus recently played in a tournament—and in the Middle East. This shows us unequivocally that football can “speak” with the greatest simplicity—through different media, but above all through television—to millions of fans.
Read the article here >>
Cartoon: “Peter Drucker Maps out the Hierarchy of Heaven”
Ratan Tata: The $2,200 “People’s Car”
Tata speaks about the Indian group’s international strategy, his plan to create a $2,200 “people’s car,” his vision of India as a knowledge center for the world, and his dedication to the social responsibilities required from companies operating in developing markets.
On the car:
“Today we’re producing a $7,000 car, the Indica. Here we’re talking about a $2,200 car, which will be smaller and will be produced in larger volumes, with all the high-volume parts manufactured in one plant. We’re also looking at more use of plastics on the body and at a very low-cost assembly operation, with some use of modern-day adhesives instead of welding. But the car is in every way a car, with an engine, a suspension, and a steering system designed for its size. We will meet all the emissions requirements. We now have some issues concerning safety, mainly because of the car’s modest size, but we will resolve them before the car reaches the market, in about three years’ time.
“In addition—and this again touches on the social dimension—we’re looking at small satellite units, with very low breakeven points, where some of the cars could be assembled, sold, and serviced. We would encourage local entrepreneurs to invest in these units, and we would train these entrepreneurs to assemble the fully knocked-down or semi-knocked-down components that we would send to them, and they would also sell the assembled vehicles and arrange for their servicing. This approach would replace the dealer, and therefore the dealer’s margin, with an assembly-cum-retail operation that would be combined with very low-cost service facilities.
On India:
“If we play our cards right as a country, we could be a supplier of IT services and IT solutions to the world. We could also be a product-development center for pharmaceuticals. We could be a very good global R&D center in biotechnology and in some of the emerging technologies, such as nanotechnology, provided we really give them the focus they would need.
On bringing talent back to India:
“Indians coming back to India really go through a cultural shock. They give up a lot in terms of the quality of life, the education of their children, the availability of medical facilities. This will also have an impact when we want to hire people who are not Indians, as we will have to do in a world without boundaries. Even if we start only with pockets of the country and make those pockets less of a cultural shock, the benefits will spread. In some ways, this is what China did with the economic zones.
On values:
“What I feel most proud of is that we have been able to grow without compromising any of the values or ethical standards that we consider important. And I am not harping on this hypocritically. It was a major decision to uphold these values and ethics in an environment that is deteriorating around you. If we had compromised them, we could have done much better, grown much faster, and perhaps been regarded as much more successful in the pure business sense. But we would have lost the one differentiation that this group has against others in the country. We would have been just another venal business house.
“I think it is wrong for a company in India to operate in exactly the same way, without any additional responsibilities, as if it were operating in the United States, let’s say. And even in the United States, I think if you had an enlightened corporation that went into the Deep South, you would see more of a sense of social responsibility, of doing more for the community, than the company might accept in New York City or Boston. Because it is inevitable that you need to be a good corporate citizen in that kind of environment. And companies that are not good corporate citizens—those that don’t hold to standards and that allow the environment and the community to suffer—are really criminals in today’s world.”
Read the McKinsey Quarterly article >>
Laurence Haughton on Peter Drucker
I received an email from Laurence
Haughton, the author, on Peter Drucker.
With his permission, here it is:
It is now five days since Peter Drucker passed away and the tributes have
filled the air like so many streamers and confetti at a ticker tape parade.According to columnists in journals and blogs Drucker was, “an American
sage,” “the uber-guru,” “profound,” and “a visionary.”America’s two most popular business pundits agree. “[Drucker was]
the right man for our times,” wrote one. And the other was just as reverential,
“The most influential management thinker in the second half of the twentieth
century.”But I don’t see it that way.
If Drucker was “the most influential” shouldn’t he have changed
a lot of executive behavior? If he truly was “profound” or the “right
man for our times” wouldn’t he have a lot of followers who practice
what he prescribed?Peter Drucker is, as he himself once wrote about management sciences pioneer
Mary Parker Follett, the “most quoted and least heeded” teacher
of management.Why he is so quoted is easy to understand. Pick up anything he wrote. I just
went back and skimmed through 1964’s “Managing for Results.”
You’ll find Drucker is incredibly insightful yet totally clear and practical.
He’s no ivory tower theorist. Drucker explains exactly what to do and
what not to do, giving systematic, logical, and consistent answers to all
the fundamental challenges of management. If you are opining about management,
he’s a perfect source to quote.But as far as being heeded… I don’t think so. What company is managed
according to his prescriptions? What leader follows his clear, specific advice?
Frankly, is there anyone who gives him anything more than lip service?
Take just one of Drucker’s lessons. He criticized organizations who issued
directives to “cut 5 or 10 percent from budgets across the board.”
He said, “This is ineffectual at best and at worst, apt to cripple the
important, result-producing efforts that usually get less money that they
need to begin with.” Yet, when have you seen a company cut costs using
Drucker’s clear distinctions between efficiency and effectiveness instead
of the across-the-board cop out?And I’ll bet others can find 100 additional quoted and ignored lessons
from Peter Drucker just like that one.
Years ago I was told “performance is the proof that the learning took
place.” If that’s true I’m sorry to say that despite all the
tributes, up to now, we’ve learned very little from Peter Drucker.
Rebranding Intel
“This might be the company’s most important makeover campaign ever.”
What’s the big deal? Apparently the Intel logo no longer has the “e” letter dropped, and the blue label is now wrapped around the corporate name.
The chip names are rebranded: single core Yonah processors will be named “Core Solo” and dual core versions will be called “Core Duo”.
Yawn.
Google Base: Googlespace & Open Knowledge Management
Another giant step in Googlespace?
“Help the world find your content. Google Base is a place where you can add all types of information that we’ll host and make searchable online.”
And so Google takes another step with another micro-service. Try it here.
And it’s not just about classifieds. It’s about Open Knowledge Management.
Wonder what Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak have to say about this… I’ll let you know when I find out.
The 7th Face of the Web: Googlespace
Back in 2000, Bill Joy, Sun’s Chief Scientist and co-founder, told people that the economic future of technology is rooted in the notion of what he called “the six Webs.”
– the “near” Web, the traditional desktop computing environment.
– the “far” Web, which includes simple interaction through, for example, a remote control while flipping through an interactive television screen.
– the “here” Web, or the industry of mobile Internet devices, which, Joy stresses are going to continue to grow in importance and popularity.
– the “weird” Web, or those systems of access that actually immerse the senses, like virtual reality or voice-activated surfing.
– the eCommerce (Business-to-Business) Web and, quite simply, the “pervasive computing” Web, or “the networks that connect people to other people and the information they need, enabling them to act on it anytime, anyplace.”
Today, there’s a 7th web- the “Search-driven” Web, i.e. the Googlespace. The “search-driven” web will bridge all 6 faces of Bill Joy’s web. And that’s why Microsoft is is trouble.
A simple way of looking at this: Joy’s 6 faces are technology or platform-based. This is the old geek view of technology- shared by Microsoft et al.
In reality, the user doesn’t care about platforms – just finding what they need- the “user-based” view. And that is fast becoming Googlespace.
The Hidden Drivers of Demand
Customer Value Engineering™ reveals what matters most, says MercerMC:
“Customers often start a negotiation by emphasizing price and product features. These things always matter, of course. But buying decisions encompass many other considerations, such as reliability, service arrangements, certainty of delivery date, and the opinions of users inside the organization or expert analysts.
“Cumulatively, these influences may account for 70% to 80% of the purchase decision. That’s why there is gold to be mined by truly understanding the customer’s world.
“The Customer Value Engineering approach goes beyond market research to uncover what customers will value and actually pay for, link these insights with the economics of the business, and create a process for building consensus and driving rapid implementation. It combines four capabilities:
– Uncovering the drivers of demand
– Segmenting customers in a smarter way than traditional categories of size or demographics
– Modeling the drivers of business economics to determine whether a given move will make or lose money
– Creating dynamic, robust modeling of the strategy that can evaluate “what if” scenarios and rapidly turn strategy into action with a minimum of risk
Download the article >>
The Birth of Internet TV: Finally!
AOL, Warner Bros Team for Online TV– In2TV.
The channels are:
– LOL TV (comedies such as Welcome Back Kotter, Perfect Strangers and Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper),
– Dramarama (Falcon Crest, Sisters and Eight Is Enough)
– Toontopia (animated shows like Beetlejuice and Pinky and the Brain)
– Heroes and Horrors (Wonder Woman, Lois & Clark: The Adventures of Superman and Babylon 5)
– Rush (action shows such as La Femme Nikita, Kung Fu and The Fugitive)
– Vintage (Growing Pains, F-Troop and Maverick)
Soon this will go global, and we’ll be able to watch TV from other countries on our “Internets.” Cricket, anyone?
The Remarkable Opportunities of Unbundled Media
Terry Heaton’s essay: TV News in a Postmodern World
“…driven by the very real demand of less time, we’ve begun the process of tasting that which is unbundled. We unbundle television shows by skipping the commercials with our DVRs. We unbundle CDs by downloading the songs we want. We unbundle the national media by subscribing to specific RSS feeds. The signs of a burgeoning unbundled media world are everywhere.”
What Terry doesn’t say: we are unbundling reality: our politics, our minds, our society, and our souls as well…
Mckinsey: Don’t blame trade for US job losses
Via outsourcingstrategy.org– from the McKinsey Quarterly:
“Many people in the United States have looked at the enormous US trade deficit and concluded that a flood of imported goods from China and the offshoring of services to India are to blame for the loss of US jobs. CNN’s Lou Dobbs has called the problem “a clear call to our business and political leaders that our trade policies simply are not working.”1 The issue isn’t the concern solely of US policy makers: the same fears about trade are rampant throughout Europe and Japan, while protectionist sentiment is rising around the world.
“But trade, particularly rising imports of goods and services, didn’t destroy the vast majority of the jobs lost in the United States since 2000. We analyzed detailed trade and industry data to estimate the extent of job dislocation due to offshoring in the manufacturing and service sectors from 2000 to 2003. This work was the first complete analysis of how the economic downturn, imports, exports, and global competition interact—directly and indirectly—to affect employment.
So who or what’s to blame? Read the article >>
Gartner: Microsoft Far Behind
Gartner’s Nick Gall:
“I just played with Windows Live this morning, and it’s (so far) nothing but an AJAX-enabled portal – and a pretty poor one at that.
“I think the real news is how far behind Microsoft is. If this is all it has at this late stage of the consumer portal market, the company is really in trouble. With no synergy with the Windows OS or even IE (there’s not even a toolbar yet), and no compelling content on the site itself, what would possibly draw users from another consumer portal?
more>>
Microsoft is always slow. In the past they’ve always been great at catching up and passing their opponents. Google isn’t going to make the Netscape mistake, though!
Google Analytics: Another Dagger in the Heart of Microsoft?
Take a look- Google Analytics gives you a free ride into the world of web behavior, and it’s integrated w/ adwords.
Here’s the pitch:
“Google Analytics tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site. You’ll be able to focus your marketing resources on campaigns and initiatives that deliver ROI, and improve your site to convert more visitors…. blah blah blah
So what’s really going on? Here’s what: Microsoft used to own your desktop, but Google will own your universe. Google will learn how users behave across websites, beating Alexa/Amazon.com at its own game and setting the stage for the final fight with Microsoft.
Every website manager will sign up for free, and Microsoft can them make them part of their network- from Adsense, to Adwords, to the applications which will replace Office.
BTW, did I forget to mention that Google is also buying cable companies? I’m sure Microsoft is freaking out right about now. This is going to be a war.
MEMO to Microsoft: guys, open up!!
On the privacy front:
# We may use personal information to provide the services you’ve requested, including services that display customized content and advertising.
# We may also use personal information for auditing, research and analysis to operate and improve Google technologies and services.
# We may share aggregated non-personal information with third parties outside of Google.
# When we use third parties to assist us in processing your personal information, we require that they comply with our Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures.
# We may also share information with third parties in limited circumstances, including when complying with legal process, preventing fraud or imminent harm, and ensuring the security of our network and services.
# Google processes personal information on our servers in the United States of America and in other countries. In some cases, we process personal information on a server outside your own country.
Do no evil, Google.
ZIBS: The Latest Collection of Branding Articles
The Zyman Institute of Brand Science at Emory University just put out a collection of branding articles:
– “Branding as Cultural Activism” by Douglas Holt
– “The CEO as Brand Guardian” by Will Rodgers and Christian Sarkar
– “In Search of a Reliable Measure of Brand Equity” by Jonathan Knowles
– “How Market-based Assets Generate Customer Value” by Raj Srivastava
– “Brand Hijack: When Unintended Segments Desire Your Brand” by Greg Thomas
– “ZIBSForum: The Power of Retail Branded Experiences” by Sarah Banick
– “The Power of an Emotional Connection” by William J. McEwen
– “ZIBSFORUM: Emotion Mining – Leveraging the Emotions Underpinning Brand Behavior” by Greg Thomas
– “Restoring the Power of Brands” by John Hagel III
[OK- so I wrote one of ’em.]
Visit zibs.com
Best Drucker Obituary: FT
And the award for the best Peter Drucker obituary goes to- Simon London of the Financial Times:
Peter Drucker, who has died at the age of 95, hated being labelled as a “guru”. But that is what he was for thousands, probably millions, of managers. Never mind that the dictionary definitions of the word range from “venerable” and “weighty” to “mediator of divine truth.” To Drucker, guru was synonymous with “charlatan”. He preferred to be known, he often said, as “just an old journalist”.
As so often in his life, he was indulging not so much in false modesty as in good-humoured self-mockery. For he was manifestly very much more than that.
To his many admirers, in Asia almost as much as his native Europe (he was born in Vienna) and his adoptive United States, he was the grand old man of provocative theory and thoughtful practice. He could always be relied upon to provide a helping hand through the latest trends in politics, society, economics, and especially business.
For people whose only exposure to his work was a single article or speech, his constant use of the quick insight, the aphorism, the analogy and the metaphor sometimes created an impression of glibness. But Drucker saw this as an occupational hazard of communicating clearly about complex issues.
From his early writing days as a journalist in the 1930s to the very last years of his life, with several professorships and three dozen respected books behind him, he continued to believe that the best ideas have to be simplified, often to the limit, in order to be effective. When criticised in the 1980s for writing a cursory newspaper article about “the five rules of successful acquisitions”, he grinned ruefully and pronounced in typically gnomic Drucker-ese: “My best ideas have only one moving part.”
That hardly did justice to the erudition and sense of perspective which underpinned his commentary. His cool, deliberate analysis whether of “pork-barrel” politics, post-communist economics, or a range of management topics from leadership to productivity, motivation to marketing was peppered with a constant flow of vivid references and parallels drawn from history, and from fields as diverse as medicine, music, even the nursery.
Talking about the importance of entrepreneurship and innovation which occupied him powerfully in his later years, along with the growth of what he called “knowledge work” and management’s wider role in society he revelled in such observations as “for the first four years, no new enterprise produces profits. Even Mozart didn’t start writing music until he was four”.
Such bon mots were often more scurrilous, as in his remark that Friedrich Engels might never have made his seminal observations of the British working class if his sexual behaviour had not so scandalised his parents that they sent him out of his native Germany. Told in Drucker’s strongly accented English, such stories produced a mixture of hilarity and wonder in his audiences.
He was certainly “one of the last encyclopaedics”, as he was introduced at a conference a few years ago. His knowledge reached far beyond the world of affairs, deeply into literature, biology and even Oriental art in which he was recognised as an authority even by the Japanese.
One of the most thoughtful analysts of Drucker’s contribution to management, Alan Kantrow, says that “many of his ideas have become part and parcel of today’s commonsense understanding of business. He had a pervasive influence.” Though by no means all his ideas were original, Drucker’s real value, says Kantrow, lay in the rigour with which they were formulated. “One could learn more and more deeply from watching him think than from studying the content of his thought.”
For decades, many managers did just that. Whether they worked for Shell, Gillette, a British bank, a German engineering company, a large hospital complex, or a medium-sized shipping company, they paid repeat visits to sit at his feet, or buy his latest book. One such executive talked of needing his “Drucker fix” every two or three years.
Drucker’s reputation, among many practitioners and theorists alike, as the father of post-war management went back to two of his early works, “Concept of the Corporation” in 1946, and “The Practice of Management” in 1954.
The former, a study of the workings of General Motors, was the first detailed account of the way a large company operated. The latter contained pathfinding work on such varied topics as the key role of marketing; the importance of clear objectives, both for the corporation and for the manager; and the need to balance long-term strategy and innovation against short-term performance.
This early work laid the foundation for such basic principles of modern business as asking: “What business are we in, and who are our customers?” It dealt with the recruitment and development of executives, the proper role of boards of directors, the defence of profits as an essential foundation of future survival, and the development of the responsible and productive worker.
Only on the last of these counts did Drucker’s principles fail to be translated into practice. In a mid-1980s interview he called this “my most conspicuous failure”, grumbling that “only now that Japan has shown the way is it being taken seriously” in Europe and the US.
It was Drucker’s ability to examine complex issues in depth, while also relating them to each other, that had such a strong influence on the study of management. Yet this landed him in bad odour with most business academics. “He is vastly undervalued by most academics”, Tom Peters, the management writer and Drucker disciple, said a few years ago. In several years at Stanford University, first as a masters student and then as a doctoral candidate, Peters found that “Drucker wasn’t mentioned once. None of his work was on our reading lists”.
Things were little better at Harvard. Even though it offered him a professorship four times, Drucker chose instead to take up appointments at lesser institutions. Nor does Drucker rate much of a mention in most histories of management thought. All that is in spite of the fact that, as Peters puts it, “Drucker was the first to provide an intellectual framework to analyse the corporation”.
Drucker’s own explanation of his relations with academia was revealing, not only of his own character and that of the university system, but of the nature of high-class gurudom. “Earlier theorists wrote only for a small circle their jargon was often impenetrable,’ he said.
“I put together the bits and pieces of the jigsaw, including what was missing, such as the role of top management, strategy, management-by-objectives, entrepreneurship and innovation. I went to work on it and built a discipline. But I have a deep horror of obscurity and arrogance, so I presented it in a form that people could apply. I don’t believe in specialisation, and academia has always resented that.”
In the words of Tom Peters: “Drucker effectively by-passed the intellectual establishment. So it’s not surprising that they hated his guts.”
With the passing of the years, however, relations became a little less strained. Unlike most of the previous generation, several of the top business academics who came to prominance in the 1980s and 90s paid tribute to Drucker’s impact on their own work. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, of Yale and then Harvard, admitted to having been influenced heavily by Drucker’s early writings and praised his “remarkable” sense of being able to foretell the future.
Yet not everyone agreed. Despite Drucker’s protestations about the importance of small business, he remained identifed with the notion that the large corporation was the centre-piece of society. And, right to the end of his life, he was typecast as having an excessively rational view of the management process.
Moreover, despite his praise ever since 1954 for Douglas McGregor’s “Theory Y”, Drucker did not seem to fit comfortably into the school of enlightened motivation, which blossomed into management theories of worker ’empowerment’. He tended to use tell-tale phrases such as “the basic task of management is to make (our italics) people productive”. Peters, Moss Kanter et al would prefer the verb “encourage”. In the words of one long-standing student of Drucker’s writing, “he was always a bit too top-down”.
In one sense, Drucker could be accused of having lost something of his intellectual vitality in his earlier years. Today’s business community is searching for more advice on how to stimulate entrepreneurship and innovation, and how to manage joint ventures and strategic alliances. Drucker was writing about such issues extensively right up to his death, yet his basic view, expressed several years ago, was “we already know how to do all that just organise yourself properly”.
Right across the management spectrum, he claimed, “the academic work that’s being done is on perfecting things it’s variations on themes we all discovered some time ago”. Business studies had therefore entered a long and rather sterile period, he argued. The main exception to this view of the rather arid future of management studies concerned management as a social function. “We have become a society of organisations,” he used to say, in what became a familiar Druckerism. “Yet who takes care of the public good?”
The need for much better management extended not only to private enterprise, he argued, but also to the public sector and, much more broadly, to the body politic itself. In a memorable phrase, he said “politics has become the theatre of the absurd, with politicians declaiming in front of an empty audience, just like the Comédie Française. There’s a new pluralism in society that we don’t understand but that we have to make work”.
In his last few years, Drucker felt increasingly in common, to some extent, with Britain’s Charles Handy that the major new challenges for management lie well beyond its commonly accepted field of operations. In the process of developing into “the distinct organ of our society” over the past 50 years, management had become intricately bound up with political, legal and social issues. It had, in other words, become “affected with the public interest”. To work out what that implied, for both theory and practice, would constitute the prime management agenda of the next 50 years, he forecast.
Peter Drucker might have ended his life a little weary of the “old” issues, as he saw them, but, half a century after his first breakthrough into management, he was still extending its boundaries with his customary energy and clarity of mind.
What Happened to Nathan Myhrvold
The article I mentioned in the previous post also mentions Nathan Myhrvold:
Nathan Myhrvold, part of Microsoft’s early brain trust and the former head of its heavily endowed research arm, founded Intellectual Ventures, a fund that he says spends “millions of dollars” annually to support individual inventors in long-term projects. Mr. Myhrvold started his fund about five years ago after he retired from Microsoft; he now backs about 20 inventors in such fields as nanotechnology, optics, computing, biotechnology and medical devices.
“As far as we know, we’re the only people who are doing this – which means we’re either incredibly smart or incredibly dumb,” Mr. Myhrvold said. “There’s a network of venture capitalists for start-ups that have created thousands and thousands of businesses, but very little for inventors.”
Mr. Myhrvold says that most public and academic grants are for investigating well-defined research problems – and not for backing, as he does, “an invention before it exists.” His staff of about 50 people files about 25 patent applications a month on behalf of inventors and his fund. He and his staff also help inventors refine ideas, pay for their time and labor and share ownership stakes in projects with them.
“We all love the goose that lays the golden eggs but somehow we’ve forgotten about the goose,” Mr. Myhrvold said. “This decade I’m hoping will be the decade of the invention.”
Very cool:
Intellectual Ventures is an invention company. We conceive and patent our own inventions in-house through a world-renowned staff of internal and external scientists and engineers. We also acquire and license patented inventions from other inventors around the world. Our network of invention sources includes: large and small businesses, governments, academia, and individual inventors. These inventions span a diverse range of technologies including: software, semiconductors, wireless, consumer electronics, networking, lasers, biotechnology, and medical devices. Our current focus is on developing our invention portfolio. Over time, we intend to market our portfolio on a broad and non-exclusive basis through a variety of channels including spin-out companies.
A new intellectual-property business model.
Have We Given Up on Science?
“Are U.S. Innovators Losing Their Competitive Edge? asks as article in today’s New York Times.
The article cites a report from the National Academy of Sciences which tries to ring the alarm: “Although many people assume that the United States will always be a world leader in science and technology, this may not continue to be the case inasmuch as great minds and ideas exist throughout the world. We fear the abruptness with which a lead in science and technology can be lost – and the difficulty of recovering a lead once lost, if indeed it can be regained at all.”
The report cites China and India among a number of economically promising countries that may be poised to usurp America’s leadership in innovation and job growth.
“For the first time in generations, the nation’s children could face poorer prospects than their parents and grandparents did,” the report said. “We owe our current prosperity, security and good health to the investments of past generations, and we are obliged to renew those commitments.”
The Industrial Research Institute, an organization in Arlington, Va., that represents some of the nation’s largest corporations, is also concerned that the academic and financial support for scientific innovation is lagging in the United States. The group’s most recent data indicate that from 1986 to 2001, China, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan all awarded more doctoral degrees in science and engineering than did the United States. Between 1991 and 2003, research and development spending in America trailed that of China, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan – in China’s case by billions of dollars.
Read the report. Here’s the TOC:
1 A Disturbing Mosaic
2 Why Are Science and Technology Critical to America\’s Prosperity in the 21st Century
3 How is America Doing Now in Science and Technology
4 What Actions Should America Take to Remain Prosperous in the 21st Century
5 Ten Thousand Teachers-Ten Million Minds
6 Sowing the Seeds
7 Best and the Brightest
8 Innovation Incentives
9 What Might the United States Be Like if it is Not Competitive in Science and Technology
Ouch!
BTW, the National Academy of Sciences also has this report available online: Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences, Second Edition (1999)
Heck, just listen to what Peter Drucker had to say.
All is not lost, yet. But we took a wrong turn somewhere.
The article raises another point:
“The inventiveness of individuals depends on the context, including sociopolitical, economic, cultural and institutional factors,” said Merton C. Flemings, a professor emeritus at M.I.T. who holds 28 patents and oversees the Lemelson-M.I.T. Program for inventors. “We remain one of the most inventive countries in the world. But all the signs suggest that we won’t retain that pre-eminence much longer. The future is very bleak, I’m afraid.”
Mr. Flemings said that private and public capital was not being adequately funneled to the kinds of projects and people that foster invention. The study of science is not valued in enough homes, he observed, and science education in grade school and high school is sorely lacking.
But quantitative goals, he said, are not enough. Singapore posts high national scores in mathematics, he said, but does not have a reputation for churning out new inventions. In fact, he added, researchers from Singapore have studied school systems in America to try to glean the source of something ineffable and not really quantifiable: creativity.
“In addition to openness, tolerance is essential in an inventive modern society,” a report sponsored by the Lemelson-M.I.T. Program said last year. “Creative people, whether artists or inventive engineers, are often nonconformists and rebels. Indeed, invention itself can be perceived as an act of rebellion against the status quo.”
Which brings us to Richard Florida…
Cartoon: “Peter Drucker Waits in Line…”
Peter Drucker: The Best Podcast Ever
I just stumbled on to the best Peter Drucker interview ever. The interview aired on Tuesday, August 02, 2005 – so this is fairly recent stuff. It’s an hour long, but terribly important for us now.
In the interview, we find out what Drucker thinks about:
– US involvement in Iraq
– Roosevelt, Truman, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, a hint about Bush
– The Future of America
– Executive Pay
– Knowledge Worker Productivity
– The Knowledge Society
– The American College system
– Capitalism & Free Markets
– The Future of Government
– Cutting the Things that Government is Good At
– Power and its Limits
– The First Constituent – NOT the Shareholder but the Consumer (!)
– Power Sharing in the New World
– The Prosperity of Denmark and Holland
– Where the World is Going
– The End of Western Dominance
– Pluralism: Values and Co-Existence
– Information not Power
– 30 Rough Years Ahead
– America’s Return to Humility
– God
The interview blew me away. Listen to it here
I also found a great print interview with Drucker with Forbes’ Rich Karlgaard. Here are some excerpts:
What Needs to Be Done
Successful leaders don’t start out asking, “What do I want to do?” They ask, “What needs to be done?” Then they ask, “Of those things that would make a difference, which are right for me?” They don’t tackle things they aren’t good at. They make sure other necessities get done, but not by them. Successful leaders make sure that they succeed! They are not afraid of strength in others. Andrew Carnegie wanted to put on his gravestone, “Here lies a man who knew how to put into his service more able men than he was himself.”
Check Your Performance
Effective leaders check their performance. They write down, “What do I hope to achieve if I take on this assignment?” They put away their goals for six months and then come back and check their performance against goals. This way, they find out what they do well and what they do poorly. They also find out whether they picked the truly important things to do. I’ve seen a great many people who are exceedingly good at execution, but exceedingly poor at picking the important things. They are magnificent at getting the unimportant things done. They have an impressive record of achievement on trivial matters.
Mission Driven
Leaders communicate in the sense that people around them know what they are trying to do. They are purpose driven–yes, mission driven. They know how to establish a mission. And another thing, they know how to say no. The pressure on leaders to do 984 different things is unbearable, so the effective ones learn how to say no and stick with it. They don’t suffocate themselves as a result. Too many leaders try to do a little bit of 25 things and get nothing done. They are very popular because they always say yes. But they get nothing done.
Creative Abandonment
A critical question for leaders is, “When do you stop pouring resources into things that have achieved their purpose?” The most dangerous traps for a leader are those near-successes where everybody says that if you just give it another big push it will go over the top. One tries it once. One tries it twice. One tries it a third time. But, by then it should be obvious this will be very hard to do. So, I always advise my friend Rick Warren, “Don’t tell me what you’re doing, Rick. Tell me what you stopped doing.”
The Rise of the Modern Multinational
The modern multinational corporation was invented in 1859. Siemens invented it because the English Siemens company had grown faster than the German parent. Before the Second World War, IBM was a small maker, not of computers, but of adding machines. They had one branch in England, which was very typical for the era. In the 1920s, General Motors bought a German and English and then Australian automobile manufacturer. The first time somebody from Detroit actually visited the European subsidiaries was in 1950. A trip to Europe was a big trip. You were gone three months. I still remember the excitement when the then head of GM went to Europe in the 1920s to buy the European properties. He never went back.
21st Century Organizations
Let me give you one example. This happens to be a consulting firm headquartered in Boston. Each morning, between 8 A.M. and 9 A.M. Boston time, which is 5 A.M. in the morning here in California and 11 P.M. in Tokyo, the firm conducts a one-hour management meeting on the Internet. That would have been inconceivable a few years back when you couldn’t have done it physically. And for a few years, I worked with this firm closely and I had rented a room in a nearby motel and put in a videoconferencing screen. Once a week, I participated in this Internet meeting and we could do it quite easily, successfully. As a result of which, that consulting firm is not organized around localities but around clients.
How To Lead a 21st Century Organization
Don’t travel so much. Organize your travel. It is important that you see people and that you are seen by people maybe once or twice a year. Otherwise, don’t travel. Make them come to see you. Use technology–it is cheaper than traveling. I don’t know anybody who can work while traveling. Do you? The second thing to say is make sure that your subsidiaries and foreign offices take up the responsibility to keep you informed. So, ask them twice a year, “What activities do you need to report to me?” Also ask them, “What about my activity and my plans do you need to know from me?” The second question is just as important.
Prisoner of Your Own Organization
When you are the chief executive, you’re the prisoner of your organization. The moment you’re in the office, everybody comes to you and wants something, and it is useless to lock the door. They’ll break in. So, you have to get outside the office. But still, that isn’t traveling. That’s being at home or having a secret office elsewhere. When you’re alone, in your secret office, ask the question, “What needs to be done?” Develop your priorities and don’t have more than two. I don’t know anybody who can do three things at the same time and do them well. Do one task at a time or two tasks at a time. That’s it. OK, two works better for most. Most people need the change of pace. But, when you are finished with two jobs or reach the point where it’s futile, make the list again. Don’t go back to priority three. At that point, it’s obsolete.
How Organizations Fall Down
Make sure the people with whom you work understand your priorities. Where organizations fall down is when they have to guess at what the boss is working at, and they invariably guess wrong. So the CEO needs to say, “This is what I am focusing on.” Then the CEO needs to ask of his associates, “What are you focusing on?” Ask your associates, “You put this on top of your priority list–why?” The reason may be the right one, but it may also be that this associate of yours is a salesman who persuades you that his priorities are correct when they are not. So, make sure that you understand your associates’ priorities and make sure that after you have that conversation, you sit down and drop them a two-page note–“This is what I think we discussed. This is what I think we decided. This is what I think you committed yourself to within what time frame.” Finally, ask them, “What do you expect from me as you seek to achieve your goals?”
The Transition from Entrepreneur to Large Company CEO
Again, let’s start out discussing what not to do. Don’t try to be somebody else. By now you have your style. This is how you get things done. Don’t take on things you don’t believe in and that you yourself are not good at. Learn to say no. Effective leaders match the objective needs of their company with the subjective competencies. As a result, they get an enormous amount of things done fast.
How Capable Leaders Blow It
One of the ablest men I’ve worked with, and this is a long time back, was Germany’s last pre-World War II democratic chancellor, Dr. Heinrich Bruning. He had an incredible ability to see the heart of a problem. But he was very weak on financial matters. He should have delegated but he wasted endless hours on budgets and performed poorly. This was a terrible failing during a Depression and it led to Hitler. Never try to be an expert if you are not. Build on your strengths and find strong people to do the other necessary tasks.
The Danger Of Charisma
You know, I was the first one to talk about leadership 50 years ago, but there is too much talk, too much emphasis on it today and not enough on effectiveness. The only thing you can say about a leader is that a leader is somebody who has followers. The most charismatic leaders of the last century were called Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Mussolini. They were mis-leaders! Charismatic leadership by itself certainly is greatly overstated. Look, one of the most effective American presidents of the last 100 years was Harry Truman. He didn’t have an ounce of charisma. Truman was as bland as a dead mackerel. Everybody who worked for him worshiped him because he was absolutely trustworthy. If Truman said no, it was no, and if he said yes, it was yes. And he didn’t say no to one person and yes to the next one on the same issue. The other effective president of the last 100 years was Ronald Reagan. His great strength was not charisma, as is commonly thought, but that he knew exactly what he could do and what he could not do.
How To Reinvigorate People
Within organizations there are people who, typically in their 40s, hit a midlife crisis when they realize that they won’t make it to the top or discover that they are not yet first-rate. This happens to engineers and accountants and technicians. The worst midlife crisis is that of physicians, as you know. They all have a severe midlife crisis. Basically, their work becomes awfully boring. Just imagine seeing nothing for 30 years but people with a skin rash. They have a midlife crisis, and that’s when they take to the bottle. How do you save these people? Give them a parallel challenge. Without that, they’ll soon take to drinking or to sleeping around. In a coeducational college, they sleep around and drink. The two things are not incompatible, alas! Encourage people facing a midlife crisis to apply their skills in the non-profit sector.
Character Development
We have talked a lot about executive development. We have been mostly talking about developing people’s strength and giving them experiences. Character is not developed that way. That is developed inside and not outside. I think churches and synagogues and the 12-step recovery programs are the main development agents of character today.
Wow. And that was in print.
Again, don’t forget to listen to the interview here
Managing Ignorance: The Passing of Peter Drucker
Farewell Peter Drucker.
The biggest business thinker of them all is gone. Perhaps business will start listening to him now. A sad day.
from the NY Times:
Peter F. Drucker, the political economist and author, whose view that big business and nonprofit enterprises were the defining innovation of the 20th century led him to pioneering social and management theories, died yesterday at his home in Claremont, Calif. He was 95.
His death was announced by Claremont Graduate University.
Mr. Drucker thought of himself, first and foremost, as a writer and teacher, though he eventually settled on the term “social ecologist.” He became internationally renowned for urging corporate leaders to agree with subordinates on objectives and goals and then get out of the way of decisions about how to achieve them.
He challenged both business and labor leaders to search for ways to give workers more control over their work environment. He also argued that governments should turn many functions over to private enterprise and urged organizing in teams to exploit the rise of a technology-astute class of “knowledge workers.”
Mr. Drucker staunchly defended the need for businesses to be profitable but he preached that employees were a resource, not a cost. His constant focus on the human impact of management decisions did not always appeal to executives, but they could not help noticing how it helped him foresee many major trends in business and politics.
He began talking about such practices in the 1940’s and 50’s, decades before they became so widespread that they were taken for common sense. Mr. Drucker also foresaw that the 1970’s would be a decade of inflation, that Japanese manufacturers would become major competitors for the United States and that union power would decline.
For all his insights, he clearly owed much of his impact to his extraordinary energy and skills as a communicator. But while Mr. Drucker loved dazzling audiences with his wit and wisdom, his goal was not to be known as an oracle. Indeed, after writing a rosy-eyed article shortly before the stock market crash of 1929 in which he outlined why stocks prices would rise, he pledged to himself to stay away from gratuitous predictions. Instead, his views about where the world was headed generally arose out of advocacy for what he saw as moral action.
His first book (“The End of Economic Man,” 1939)was intended to strengthen the will of the free world to fight fascism. His later economic and social predictions were intended to encourage businesses and social groups to organize in ways that he felt would promote human dignity and vaccinate society against political and economic chaos.
“He is remarkable for his social imagination, not his futurism,” said Jack Beatty in a 1998 review of Mr. Drucker’s work “The World According to Peter Drucker.”
Mr. Drucker, who was born in Vienna and never completely shed his Austrian accent, worked in Germany as a reporter until Hitler rose to power and then in a London investment firm before emigrating to the United States in 1937. He became an American citizen in 1943.
Recalling the disasters that overran the Europe of his youth and watching the American response left him convinced that good managers were the true heroes of the century.
The world, especially the developed world, had recovered from repeated catastrophe because “ordinary people, people running the everyday concerns of business and institutions, took responsibility and kept on building for tomorrow while around them the world came crashing down,” he wrote in 1986 in “The Frontiers of Management.”
Mr. Drucker never hesitated to make suggestions he knew would be viewed as radical. He advocated legalization of drugs and stimulating innovation by permitting new ventures to charge the government for the cost of regulations and paperwork. He was not surprised that General Motors for years ignored nearly every recommendation in “The Concept of the Corporation,” the book he published in 1946 after an 18-month study of G.M. that its own executives had commissioned.
From his early 20’s to his death, Mr. Drucker held various teaching posts, including a 20-year stint at the Stern School of Management at New York University and, since 1971, a chair at the Claremont Graduate School of Management. He also consulted widely, devoting several days a month to such work into his 90’s. His clients included G.M., General Electric and Sears, Roebuck but also the Archdiocese of New York and several Protestant churches; government agencies in the United States, Canada and Japan; universities; and entrepreneurs.
For over 50 years, at least half of the consulting work was done free for nonprofits and small businesses. As his career progressed and it became clearer that competitive pressures were keeping businesses from embracing many practices he advocated, like guaranteed wages and lifetime employment for industrial workers, he became increasingly interested in “the social sector,” as he called the nonprofit groups.
Mr. Drucker counseled groups like the Girl Scouts to think like businesses even though their bottom line was “changed lives” rather than profits. He warned them that donors would increasingly judge them on results rather than intentions. In 1990, Frances Hesselbein, the former national director of the Girl Scouts, organized a group of admirers to honor him by setting up the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management in New York to expose nonprofits to Mr. Drucker’s thinking and to new concepts in management.
Mr. Drucker’s greatest impact came from his writing. His more than 30 books, which have sold tens of millions of copies in more than 30 languages, came on top of thousands of articles, including a monthly op-ed column in The Wall Street Journal from 1975 to 1995.
Among the sayings of Chairman Peter, as he was sometimes called, were these:
¶”Marketing is a fashionable term. The sales manager becomes a marketing vice president. But a gravedigger is still a gravedigger even when it is called a mortician – only the price of the burial goes up.”
¶”One either meets or one works.”
¶”The only things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction and malperformance.”
¶”Stock option plans reward the executive for doing the wrong thing. Instead of asking, ‘Are we making the right decision?’ he asks, ‘How did we close today?’ It is encouragement to loot the corporation.”
Mr. Drucker’s thirst for new experiences never waned. He became so fascinated with Japanese art during his trips to Japan after World War II that he eventually helped write “Adventures of the Brush: Japanese Paintings” (1979), and lectured on Oriental art at Pomona College in Claremont from 1975 to 1985.
Peter Ferdinand Drucker was born Nov. 19, 1909, one of two sons of Caroline and Adolph Drucker, a prominent lawyer and high-ranking civil servant in the Austro-Hungarian government. He left Vienna in 1927 to work for an export firm in Hamburg, Germany, and to study law.
Mr. Drucker then moved to Frankfurt, where he earned a doctorate in international and public law in 1931 from the University of Frankfurt, became a reporter and then senior editor in charge of financial and foreign news at the newspaper General-Anzeiger, and, while substitute teaching at the university, met Doris Schmitz, a 19-year-old student. They became reacquainted after waving madly while passing each other going opposite directions on a London subway escalator in 1933 and were married in 1937.
Mr. Drucker had moved to England to work as a securities analyst and writer after watching the rise of the Nazis with increasing alarm. In England, he took an economics course from John Maynard Keynes in Cambridge, but was put off by how much the talk centered on commodities rather than people.
Mr. Drucker’s reputation as a political economist was firmly established with the publication in 1939 of “The End of Economic Man.” The New York Times said it brought a “remarkable vision and freshness” to the understanding of fascism. The book’s observations, along with those in articles he wrote for Harpers and The New Republic, caught the eye of policy makers in the federal government and at corporations as the country prepared for war, and landed him a job teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y.
Writing “The Future of Industrial Man,” published in 1942 after Mr. Drucker moved to Bennington College in Vermont, convinced him that he needed to understand big organizations from the inside. Rebuffed in his requests to work with several major companies, he was delighted when General Motors called in late 1943 proposing that he study its structure and policies. To avoid having him treated like a management spy, G.M. agreed to let him publish his findings.
Neither G.M. nor Mr. Drucker expected the public to be interested because no one had ever written such a management profile, but “The Concept of the Corporation” became an overnight sensation when it was published in 1946. ” ‘Concept of the Corporation’ is a book about business the way ‘Moby Dick’ is a book about whaling,” said Mr. Beatty, referring to the focus on social issues extending far beyond G.M.’s immediate operating challenges.
In it, Mr. Drucker argued that profitability was crucial to a business’s health but more importantly to full employment. Management could achieve sustainable profits only by treating employees like valuable resources. That, he argued, required decentralizing the power to make decisions, including giving hourly workers more control over factory life, and guaranteed wages.
In the 1950’s, Mr. Drucker began proclaiming that democratic governments had become too big to function effectively. This, he said, was a threat to the freedom of their citizens and to their economic well-being.
Unlike many conservative thinkers, Mr. Drucker wanted to keep government regulation over areas like food and drugs and finance. Indeed, he argued that the rise of global businesses required stronger governments and stronger social institutions, including more powerful unions, to keep them from forgetting social interests.
According to Claremont Graduate University, Mr. Drucker’s survivors include his wife, Doris, an inventor and physicist; his children, Audrey Drucker of Puyallup, Wash., Cecily Drucker of San Francisco, Joan Weinstein of Chicago, and Vincent Drucker of San Rafael, Calif.; and six grandchildren.
Early last year, in an interview with Forbes magazine, Mr. Drucker was asked if there was anything in his long career that he wished he had done but had not been able to do.
“Yes, quite a few things,” he said. “There are many books I could have written that are better than the ones I actually wrote. My best book would have been “Managing Ignorance,” and I’m very sorry I didn’t write it.”
IBM Goes a Blogging
From AdAge:
IBM SEES BLOGGING AS MARKETING’S NEXT BIG THING
Company’s ‘Blogger in Chief’ Encourages Employees to Publish to Outside World
Far from viewing workday blogging as bad thing, IBM sees it as the next big thing for marketing.
Eyeing blogging’s potential as a way to influence potential employees and business partners, IBM began formally offering blogging tools to its workers six months ago. The tools came complete with a list of a dozen guidelines assembled, in true new-media fashion, by contribution to an internal “wiki” (an open-source encyclopedia) over a 10-day period.
IBM’s ‘blogger in chief’ “Other companies have fired people for blogging, but IBM is encouraging it,” said Christopher Barger, Big Blue’s unofficial “blogger in chief.”
The list offers simple, almost common-sense pointers, such as follow the IBM business code of conduct; respect copyright laws; and don’t reveal proprietary information. The company now has 15,000 registrants on its internal blog, with more than 2,200 of those employees maintaining external blogs. Wikis and RSS feeds are used internally for collaboration and automated information feeds.
Its embrace of digital marketing also extends to podcasting, with the company creating podcasts around cultural tech themes such as the home of the future, the car of the future and the store of the future.
Bonding technique “Marketers should look at blogs as a real-time cheat sheet on how to be relevant with customers,” said Intelliseek’s chief marketing officer, Pete Blackshaw. “The name of the game is to be as conversational as possible vs. being static. … It’s a bonding technique with your consumer.”
It’s also an established technique among tech companies such as Microsoft and Sun Microsystems that also have extensive employee blogging and emerging media programs. Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble (known also by his blog’s name, Scobleizer) and developer network Channel9 have gone a long way in helping reverse the company’s so-called evil empire reputation.
In some respects, employee blogging is reminiscent of traditional employee testimonial advertising — after all, if pilots and flight attendants can extol the virtues of Southwest Airlines in ads, why shouldn’t IBM’s own experts open blog discussions with consumers?
“What [Vice Chairman] Bob Lutz is doing with the General Motors blog [fastlane/gmblogs.com] is not much different than what Lee Iacocca did in the ’80s,” Mr. Blackshaw said. “It’s all about being genuine and relevant and conversational with consumers.”
The problem, however, can sometimes be the tenor of the conversation and whether employees running amok on the Internet fits with a well-crafted, traditional marketing strategy.
“If employees are given appropriate guidelines, it can certainly be right on strategy,” said Jonathan Paisner, brand director at CoreBrand. “The broadcast model of a centralized voice saying this is our one voice out to the world isn’t realistic anymore.”
Different for tech companies
Experts caution that tech companies should be viewed differently than other companies when it comes to new media in that they likely have uncommonly large number of purveyors, experts and leading-edge adopters who are more comfortable with these technologies. That comfort goes a long way in personalizing brands and creating one-to-one relationships with customers. While IBM says it does not want to use new media as traditional sales and marketing tools, it has succeeded in opening discussions in health care and video gaming with “outsiders,” which in turn could lead to new business relationships.
“This is a way to get our expertise out there, not by shoving it down people’s throats, but by just starting conversations,” Mr. Barger said. “It expands our reputation, perceptions and reach of IBM, at the same time expanding the number of people we can learn from.”
10 Rules for Neo-Dotcoms
A while back Tom Foremski wrote about the rise of the New Rules Enterprise:
“There is a new kind of dotcom company that will emerge during Internet 2.0—this current and very distinct emerging phase of the Internet. I’m not sure what to call the new dotcom but I know what it is. It is a company that plays by the emerging new rules of the economy. New-rules companies will decimate established companies in many/most sectors but at varying rates.”
Here are Foremski’s 10 rules for the New Rules Enterprise
The first rule of the New Rules enterprise is that it is new, brand spanking new.
The second rule is it is staffed by a small group of executives that know the most efficient business processes for what the venture will produce.
The third rule is to stick as much open source/industry platform software and hardware onto the business processes as you can, creating a highly automated highly-efficient business venture with virtually free IT.
The fourth rule is to use as much web services IT as possible.
The fifth rule is you do not use venture capital–you and four others throw your credit cards into a bowl and work free for six-months to create the nucleus of the venture. It’s an atomic ventures world. It’s the $40k startup. When IT, and other infrastructure costs are so cheap and available to everyone then knowledge capital becomes the competitive differentiator—who is on your team.
The sixth rule is don’t put anybody on the payroll unless you absolutely have to.
The seventh rule is the venture does not go public, it stays private. It will have private investors/owners and those investors would be paid in dividends. By staying private newrules enterprises are a blackbox corporation. Competitors cannot peek inside because it is private and thus cannot benchmark their business model against it.
The eighth rule of the newrules enterprise is that there will be a lot of intellectual property that is not patented but is kept secret.
The ninth rule is don’t put anybody on the payroll unless you absolutely have to.
The tenth rule, and the most important, is that the newrules enterprise uses blogging techniques and technologies to market research/help produce and sell products and services that near-perfectly match the needs of their customer communities.
Guy Kawasaki: “Don’t worry, be crappy”
Guy Kawasaki says he’s “living proof that if you do one thing right in your career, you can coast on your reputation for 20 years.”
Don’t believe it. This is a man of action, and shares his philosophy in this Always-On article:
“I think the world is essentially divided into two groups: the prototypers, the people who build stuff, and the typers, the people who think the key to entrepreneurship and innovation is Microsoft Office. If you think that the key to innovation and entrepreneurship is Microsoft Office, something is wrong with you. If you’re thinking, “I have to write a business plan with Word; I need to create a pitch with PowerPoint; I need to build a 30-page financial model with Excel,” you’re on the wrong track. The key to all of this is to prototype, not type.”
Also:
“I look at that computer now and say, ‘My God, there are elements of crap in it that really embarrass me.’ It was a revolutionary product, don’t get me wrong, but we charged $2,500 for a computer that had 128K of RAM, and we were proud of that. We thought this was an ocean of RAM. And there was no software, no hard disk—which was OK because if you don’t have software, there’s nothing to copy to the hard drive. No color, no fast printing, no fast networking. What crap. But it was revolutionary crap. Don’t worry, be crappy. Ship it then test it. Don’t wait for the perfect world where chips are cheap enough and fast enough: Ship it; get your product out there.”
Seismic Shifts in U.S. Media and Advertising Industries: A Report
“Fundamental Shifts in the U.S. Media and Advertising Industries” – a report from the New Politics Institute.
Findings include:
• Extensive audience migration across and within media formats is driving major shifts in advertising spending, benefiting formats with targeting ability
• Advertisers are shifting ad dollars to digital media slower than they should given the cost and effectiveness of digital media
• The most innovative advertisers will utilize sophisticated direct marketing techniques (e.g., segmentation, targeting, etc.) and will adjust the digital marketing vehicle mix for each customer category
• Effectively creating “at scale” digital campaigns and integrating them into traditional marketing requires direct marketing skills that traditional marketers, particularly brand marketers, often lack
• Commercial advertisers are rapidly shifting dollars to internet advertising, in particular internet video, and are aggressively experimenting with new formats such as wireless and videogame advertising
Download here.
Ricardo Semler: The Maverick 11 Years Later
Another great leader. I remember reading Maverick back in ’94 and handing a copy to Riley Bechtel, the CEO of the company I used to work for when I started my career.
I’ve never forgotten Semler, and it’s great to see that he hasn’t changed!
Read this.
One more thing: Semco’s annual rate of staff turnover is 2%!!
UPDATE: Here’s a longer post on Ricardo Semler and Workplace Democratization.
Herb Kelleher: The Complete Interview
Here’s the best executive interview I’ve read in a long time. It took place back in 2003, but it reminds us why Southwest Airlines has succeeded where so many others have failed.
A few excerpts:
“We’ve never tried to lecture other companies as to how they should behave, what kind of environment they should try to create, because there are a hundred roads to Rome and you can get to Rome by any one of those roads. But our focus has always been on the well-being and the joy that we want our people to experience.
“I just always have felt that people should be natural in their behavior, that they should be able to derive enjoyment from whatever they do. When they derive enjoyment they tend to work together better, they tend to be more productive. One time a ramp agent wrote me, he said, Herb, I’ve caught on to what you’re doing, you’re making work fun – and home is work. Now, I’ve never repeated that to anybody because I thought that wouldn’t make me very popular in certain quarters but he did get it. And you know I don’t think that in order for people to be effective they have to act like automatons.
“We don’t hire a great many people in management positions from other airlines, but we have hired some over the years where we felt that the expertise was required as we grew. And it’s interesting to see their response because they get into the Southwest environment and for awhile they are like a new dog in town, just kind of sniffing around, because they want to see if this is legitimate, whether it’s genuine, whether it’s heartfelt. And after about six months, I would say, you get either one of two reactions: they feel liberated for the first time in their business lives and they say, “Hey, this is for real. I can say what I want to. I can joke. I can be friendly with people.” Or in some cases they say, “This makes me feel very insecure, the fluidity of it is daunting to me. I need a more structured environment than Southwest Airlines has in order for me to be comfortable.”
“one of the things that I want to tell you with respect to a mission statement is that a lot of people hire outside people to prepare their mission statements. My suggestion is that if you need someone outside your company to prepare a mission statement for you, then you really don’t know what your mission is and you probably don’t have one.
“the thing about it is that a group got together and said, We want to define spirit. And I said, I don’t think you want to do that. Because Wordsworth said, “It’s murder to dissect.” And I think it’s murder to dissect to take a concept like that and make it too narrow and make it confining and a strait jacket instead of as expansive as anybody wants it to be. So we’re not going to define it. As long as it’s a positive attitude, that’s the Southwest Airlines spirit. Don’t chain it. Don’t put it in jail.
“we’ve said we’re in the customer service business and we happen to operate an airline. But then any business is about providing great customer service to the people you serve. We just happen to be in one branch of the customer service business. And if you have a great customer service organization it doesn’t matter whether you’re flying people or selling steel or cleaning houses or whatever it might be.
“when we built this building I said give me an interior office because fundamentally bureaucrats scrap over space, which in and of itself I think should be somewhat meaningless, physical space. It’s the space between your ears that should be the important thing. So I did say, I want an office without a window, away from a corner.
Read the complete interview here.
We should all be so lucky to work with a leader like this!
A Checklist for Unlocking Corporate Knowledge
From a report and survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit, sponsored by Tata Consulting Services:
1. Business needs—and the kinds of knowledge required to fulfil them—have to be identified first before tools and processes are implemented. Many initiatives have failed where technology has dictated knowledge management (KM).
2. Successful KM is about shifting culture and behaviour—technology is an important element, but is subsidiary.
3. A basic mechanism in large organisations is also one of the most effective: keeping tabs on who knows what—and how to get in touch with them.
4. Though improving, KM tools are often too complicated: they have to be delivered in a way executives and staff want to use them, and to adapt to the areas/depth of knowledge needed by the individual.
5. Markets, customers, technology and competition are continually changing; knowledge gets stale fast. Is the KM framework able to handle change?
6. Can the organisation track whether kowledge is being acted on, and what value is gained from it? Even where knowledge flows quite efficiently round an organisation, companies can often do more to ensure information is acted on.
7. Is there a means to learn from experience — good and bad — and share that learning when a similar situation occurs? A vast amount of resource is wasted in corporations just by unwittingly repeating the same mistakes, or failing to repeat useful discoveries.
8. Who leads KM? Many large organisations now have a dedicated head of KM, or at least a high-ranking sponsor, to ensure the right collaborative environment.
9. Bulletin boards and web logs have begun to prove their worth to a range of organisations: they supply an instant exchange of learning or can be used by executives to communicate and keep their ear to the ground.
10. You can only get people to volunteer knowledge—you can’t force it. However, firms that provide forums, tools and opportunities for informal networking can encourage employees actively to share knowledge.
Full report here>>
The Green Business Plan Contest
ECOnomics: The Environmental Business Plan Challenge: GE and Dow Jones are looking for great business ideas that combine environmental innovation and profitability, because they truly believe that “green” business represents good business.
So if you’re a university student, an MBA candidate or a confident entrepreneur, submit your business idea and you could win $50,000. If you have an enterprise to help the earth, it’s time to get it off the ground.
Contest begins: Saturday, October 15, 2005 12:01 AM (ET)
Deadline for entries: Thursday, December 15, 2005 11:59 PM (ET)
Open to residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia who are 21 years of age or older.
Enter here >>