Sometimes not knowing what you’re doing can help you do it.
Here I make a fool of myself at the Guardian’s Activate2011 conference in London:
The Economist: $300 House on Schumpeter
Thanks, Adrian! Read the article here >>
And if you haven’t already, submit your ideas to the $300 House Open Design Challenge!
The $300 House: Go, Go, Go!
The final Harvard Business Review post in the series, and hopefully the start of some real change at the bottom of the pyramid.
Our goal is to go social for social business. Can social co-creation help the poor?
Keeping fingers crossed. Thanks to Ingersoll-Rand for the sponsorship and to all the judges and advisers at 300House.com! Thanks jovoto and COMMON. Thanks Shaun.
Thanks also to Scott Berinato at HBR and of course – VG, my partner in crime.
Quit Twitter & Improve your Marketing ROI
For the past two years I have been conducting some extensive testing with a number of my clients in various fields – software, consulting services, academics, non-profits, entertainment, and self improvement – and here’s what I came up with at the end of the study. I’m interested in one metric – conversion to sales.
Conversion to Sales
Website: 29.5% of sales
Facebook: 4% of sales
Twitter: 1.5% of sales
Print: 2% of sales
Book: 9% of sales
E-book: 7% of sales
Email newsletter and blog combined: 42% of sales
Seminars: 5%
The old rules of online marketing beat social media by a mile, period.
See you later, FB and Twitter…
Shameful: The Business Roundtable CEOs
Writes Floyd Norris in the New York Times:
The Business Roundtable, a group comprising 200 of the largest companies in the United States, is out with a “study” that claims to show that the United States levies excessively high tax rates on companies. It actually shows nothing of the kind.
This is the sort of thing that makes business look E-V-I-L.
What is the Business Roundtable? Another version of the US Chamber of Commerce? And just who are the members of this august organization?
Surprise! They’re only the CEOs of the “most respected” companies in the US.
Have they no shame? No sense of decency?
The CEOs should be embarrassed, but instead they keep playing this absurd, deceptive game. We have come to expect this sort of behavior from the oil and coal lobby, but not you. To Bank of America, General Electric, Xerox, Wal-Mart, UPS, Target, SAP, Pepsico, Microsoft, and Procter and Gamble: Grow up, ladies and gentlemen. You are hurting both democracy and capitalism. Not to mention your brand.
Good on you, Google and Apple, for not being part of this institutional lying machine.
Corruption in the USA: The US Chamber of Commerce
Rethink: Where to Look for Growth in an Uncertain World
This chart by the folks at the Eurasia Group, got me thinking. Something just doesn’t make sense:
Then it hit me. This is a rather conventional way to screen for global opportunities. If we looked at other screens like “innovation potential,” “middle class expansion rate,” “Gini coefficient shrinkage,” or “corruption index,”you’d see a very different picture.
A Third Career Path for the Corporate Social Strategist
Report: Career Path of the Corporate Social Strategist: Be Proactive or Become Social Media Help Desk
View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.
I was recently going through this report by Altimeter’s Jeremiah Owyang
when a “Deja-Vu all-over-again” wave came over me: this is exactly
what happened with corporate community managers – back in the heady days
of “community” (see JH3’s Net Gain).
Except that there was a third career path: striking off on your own.
That’s what I did with Double Loop Marketing. And it’s still the best professional decision I ever made.
How to WikiLeakproof your Company
[NOTE: This post was cross-posted on Alex Bogusky‘s FearLess Revolution; I’ll be posting some thoughts there as well from now on.]
Years ago, when I was a kid just out of college at my first job, I had an interesting chat with the legal counsel for the world’s largest engineering and construction company. We were talking about ethics and business. [All of this was before Enron and WorldCom, before Michael Moore’s Sicko or the BP oil spill.]
His advice?
As I recall, he called it the “New York Times Test” – which went something like this: if your actions or behavior show up on the front page of the New York Times, could you still face your family without embarrassment?
The point he was making was that it wasn’t about being legal or adhering to the law. Ethics was about doing the right thing above and beyond the law, because you’re going to judged by the standards set by your family, not the courts.
Today, we might just call this the WikiLeaks Test.
In other words, if you’re engaged in private activities which will cause you public grief – stop. Pretend all your actions are transparent – open to the public. For all you know, they already are!
The $300 House: Seth Godin on the Marketing Challenge
Seth Godin posts a very insightful blog entry on the HBR site. He’s talking about the challenges of marketing at the bottom of the pyramid:
When someone in poverty buys a device that improves productivity, the
device pays for itself (if it didn’t, they wouldn’t buy it.) So a drip
irrigation system, for example, may pay off by creating two or three
harvests a year instead of one.
Read all about it >>
WorldHaus: Bill Gross designs a $2500 House
The $300 House Challenge is showing us that individuals and companies are willing to make a difference.
Check out WorldHaus from Bill Gross and his team at IdeaLab. Read his Harvard Business Review post on the “design challenge” here >>
Minding the Gap: A Failure in Intuitive Intelligence?
The Gap screws up with their logo redesign. A giant failure of imagination in the boardroom.
But Umair Haque asks the right questions:
- Do designers have a seat in the boardroom — or just in the basement? How often does your CEO ever talk to a designer?
- Are designers empowered to overrule beancounters — or vice versa?
- Is the input of designers considered to be peripheral to “real” business decisions — or does it play a vital role in shaping them? Is design treated as a function or a competence?
- Are designers seen just as mechanics of mere stuff — or as vital contributors to the art of igniting new industries, markets, and catgeories, sparking more enduring demand, building trust, providing empathy, and seeding tomorrow’s big ideas?
- How much weight does senior management give to right-brained ideas, like delight, amazement, intuition, and joy? Just a little, a lot — or, as for most companies, almost none?
Seriously.
We all need to wake up. The Chamber of Commerce approach to design isn’t going to work anymore.
The $300 House: David Smith on the Financial Challenge
David Smith‘s HBR post on the financial challenge of the $300 House raises some very important issues:
Cracking the challenge of slums is the world’s biggest problem of the next quarter-century, because the ecology of slums and the ecology of cities are linked. We cannot have a healthy global economy without healthy cities, and we cannot have healthy cities without tackling slums.
Join us >>
A Creation Space for the $300 House
We’re building a “creationspace” (JSB’s word) for the $300 House-for-the-Poor at 300house.com >>
Please sign up, and tell your friends!
Steel Pulse: Hold On [4 Haiti]
Here it is. The new song from Steel Pulse – for the people of Haiti.
At: www.holdon4haiti.org >>
Watch Paul Farmer explain:
Disclosure: SELF is my client, and I helped facilitate the project.
The $300 House-for-the-Poor
Ever since the Haiti earthquake, I’ve been thinking about why we don’t have a quick-build house made of sustainable materials at a price point that the poor can afford (with micro-credit if needed).
The $300 House-for-the-Poor is an extension of the concept of “reverse innovation” (inspired by my client and friend VG) in which innovations developed in poor countries are then brought back for use in developed countries and other parts of the world. Housing impacts health, energy, education, and security.
What if we could build sustainably designed houses for the world’s poor at an affordable cost? What if these same designs could provide relief to refugees and victims of natural disasters? The we I’m referring to is a collaborative of companies, governments, and NGOs.
This type of a structure will be engineered in the same way the TATA Nano was engineered – without the traditional assumptions.
Once built, the $300 house should be used across the globe – from Haiti, to Africa, India, and yes, even in this country, to help the homeless.
So what are we waiting for? It’s time to get busy designing the $300 House!
The Auto-Industry Turnaround: Electric Batteries – Made in the USA
The political intentions of our GOP friends would leave the US with a hollowed-out economy.
Here is an example of how Obama’s unpopular bail-out for the auto-industry led to the creation of a new and critical cleantech industry – electric batteries – in this country. What say you, FOX News?
Alex Bogusky, Hunter Lovins & Catherine Greener: A Wake Up Call for Sustainability
Watch:
Good for you Alex Bogusky! Can this ex-ad-man save the planet?
More on Hunter Lovins and Catherine Greener >>
Shine, Baby, Shine: Larry Hagman talks Solar
Go J.R.! Note he mentions my client – the Solar Electric Light Fund. Stay tuned for more news about them…
I like the SolarWorld ads Hagman does quite a bit. Here he’s talking to Sue Ellen (who seems to be blaming him for BP’s mess in the Gulf):
Shine, baby, shine! Well said, Larry Hagman!
The thing about Hagman is he put his money where his mouth is – years ago – by converting his estate to solar, before solar was cool.
Courage: Kindra Arnesen takes on BP
Question: Will President Obama invite Kindra Arnesan to the White House? She represents “We the People,” not “Them the Corporations.”
Run for governor, Kindra!
Now we know that our corporate newsmedia isn’t going to cover this, let’s see if Rolling Stone magazine or The Daily Show will. Funny when the news comes from the edge, not the center. The center continues to not hold…
Marketing ROI: Notes on Advertising Effectiveness
For the first time, in 2010, online advertising will pass traditional advertising on TV and print:
While this is remarkable, I can tell you where the highest ROI is.
It’s with the Republican party. You can buy every single Republican vote for a paltry $34 million, as the health care circus has shown us.
Wow. Who needs Google when all you need is the budget for one Superbowl ad. Think about that: all it takes to buy the entire GOP is one Superbowl ad. There goes the future of our country.
PS – On a side note, I wonder what it takes to buy our Supreme Court… 5 bucks to Clarence Thomas’ wife?
Forrester should have talked to Jakob Nielsen (What You can Learn from their Mistakes)
Just a few days ago I praised Forrester‘s decision to create individual blogs for all their analysts. So they finally get it, I thought. Boy, was I wrong!
Yesterday I noticed how their migration to the new blogging platform was executed:
Yes, that’s the dreaded “The requested page could not be found” message.
Apparently, for Forrester, moving to a new platform means all old URLs die.
This is just so wrong. Linkrot is a common mistake that companies and institutions make all too often. For this to happen at an institution like Forrester shows me they don’t understand web basics. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of big companies have made this mistake, but for Forrester it’s inexcusable!
Maybe Forrester should have a chat with Jakob Nielsen. Check this:
Any URL that has ever been exposed to the Internet should live forever: never let any URL die since doing so means that other sites that link to you will experience linkrot. If these sites are conscientious, they will eventually update the link, but not all sites do so. Thus, many potential new users will be met by an error message the first time they visit your site instead of getting the valuable content they were expecting. Remember, people follow links because they want something on your site: the best possible introduction and more valuable than any advertising for attracting new customers.
and
At other times, it becomes necessary to re-architect a site and impose a new structure. Even then, the rule continues to be: you are not allowed to break any old links. The solution is to set up a set of redirects: a scheme whereby the server tells the browser that the requested page is to be found at a new URL. All decent browsers will automatically take the user to the new URL, and really good browsers will even update their bookmark database to use the new URL in the future if the user had bookmarked the old URL.
I remember when the same stupid mistake was made by Harvard Business Review back when they switched domains from hbswk.hbs.edu to harvardbusiness.org. Overnight, they destroyed their online ecosystem, as Forrester has just done.
What’s the big deal, you ask? In today’s connected world, this is brand destruction plain and simple. Not the way to build an attention platform.
Finding Your Blog’s Voice: The Company, the Individual, and Thought Leadership
Every now and then, a CEO or company founder asks me one (or both) of these two questions:
1) must I have a separate blog from the company site?
2) do I have to use my name on the blog?
My answer depends on the individual. It’s quite simple, really.
If I think they’re a thought-leader in their industry – that’s to say their opinions and ideas lead the field – then I often encourage them to blog under their own name on a blog that stands outside their company domain (more on that in a second).
The key assumption is that they are thought leaders. If I don’t get this assumption right, we are all wasting time. There’s no point setting up a double-loop model if you aren’t going to have something important to add to the conversation. Here’s what to do instead: have a company blog, put your press releases on it, and talk about your products. Have your agency Twitter and Facebook away to their heart’s content. Just don’t call it thought leadership, because it isn’t.
So, now that we’ve established that, let’s look at what is thought-leadership.
How do you know you are a thought leader? Here are some clues:
1) people you’ve never heard of start emailing you long (relevant) notes about something you said on your blog
2) your clients start reading your blog – so do analysts, journalists, and others you respect
3) you notice your blog gets ten times more traffic than your company website
4) you start getting calls from prospects asking for your services (and products)
If these four things don’t happen, (1) you’re not blogging right, or worse, (2) you aren’t a thought leader.
Now let’s talk about individuals and why using your name is actually a very good idea.
Authenticity. People relate to other people. We see this in entertainment: Oprah, Martha Stewart, David Letterman, Elvis, Bob Marley; in sports: Shaun White, Cristiano Ronaldo, Pele, Ali (and unfortunately Tiger Woods); and in business: Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Jeffrey Immelt. So if you’re the founder or CEO, and you have a message worth getting out, you want people to know who you are. The connection is personal not corporate.
Passion. If you believe fiercely in what you say, do, and think, then it is this passion that people want to connect to – directly. Without that PR person. Passion can’t be staged.
Trust. Your voice as an individual is far more trustworthy than a faceless corp. And you are believable when you believe.
Findability. People search for names. So if you write a book, they’ll search for you, the author. “Byron Katie”* gets 10X more searches than “The Work,” for example.
Longevity. As a person, you live till you die. You may switch companies, or labels, or publishers. You, the brand, stays constant. Your attention platform is how you go direct to the customer, no resellers necessary. Your followers stay with you forever.
Ideas. Companies don’t have good ideas, people do. Good ideas originate in the heads of your people. These are your thought-leaders. Don’t make them anonymous thinking this will help your company; it won’t.
The Brand. Too much has been said about you, the brand. A company can renovate its brand by hiring an ad agency. You, on the other hand, have the opportunity to be real.
Lately, even large companies are seeing the benefits of using thought leaders as ambassadors for their brands.
So we see Don Tapscott and Tammy Erickson* at NGenera, JSB* and John Hagel* at Deloitte, Chris Meyer at Monitor, etc. etc.
At academic institutions we see examples like Vijay Govindarajan* at Dartmouth and Tom Davenport* and Larry Prusak* at Babson College.
The CEO blog works well for startups and SMBs as well: Gaurav Bhalla* for Knowledge Kinetics, Francis Cholle* for The Human Company, Dean McMann* for McMann & Ransford, Phil Townsend* at Townsend and Associates, Bob Freling at SELF, and Steven Feinberg* at Steven Feinberg Inc.
When a blog is shared – i.e. when more than one executive participate – then it is alright to pick another name, usually connected to the topic we want to blog about. See: Steve Lesem* at Mezeo.
* disclosure: Tammy Erickson, JSB, JH3, VG, Tom Davenport, Larry Prusak, Gaurav Bhalla, Francis Cholle, Dean McMann, Phil Townsend, Bob Freling, Byron Katie, and Steve Lesem are some of my clients.
VG: “The U.S. Must Grab the Lead on Green”
Vijay Govindarajan on the HBR blog: The U.S. Must Grab the Lead on Green. High time our business leaders started leading, as VG encourages them to do.
According to VG:
At the company level, many energy businesses are unwilling to
cannibalize their existing services and their current investments. At
the national level, the same dynamics are in play. Aided and abetted by
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the traditional energy lobby (oil, coal)
is using its political and economic muscle to stifle innovation in
alternative energy and clean technologies.
Don’t get me started on the losers at the US Chamber of Commerce!
Zero Currency: Fighting Corruption at the Point of Sale
A nice story from the World Bank blog about a grass-roots organization‘s efforts to stop petty corruption in India and around the world:
…the idea was first conceived by an Indian physics professor at the
University of Maryland, who, in his travels around India, realized how
widespread bribery was and wanted to do something about it. He came up
with the idea of printing zero-denomination notes and handing them out
to officials whenever he was asked for kickbacks as a way to show his
resistance. Anand took this idea further: to print them en masse,
widely publicize them, and give them out to the Indian people. He
thought these notes would be a way to get people to show their
disapproval of public service delivery dependent on bribes. The notes
did just that. The first batch of 25,000 notes were met with such
demand that 5th Pillar has ended up distributing one million zero-rupee
notes to date since it began this initiative. Along the way, the
organization has collected many stories from people using them to
successfully resist engaging in bribery.
I like it. Now let’s send some “zero dollars” to the Famous Five justices Supreme Court, the Blue-Dog Democrats, and the entire Republican party.
Brand Destruction: Toyota loses its way
No excuses.
First Tylenol, now Toyota. Same old story. Silence is not damage control.
Now the NHTSA is looking at the pedal maker. There must be a way to check the electronics – some way to look at the log files, perhaps?
Note that both companies are blaming their suppliers.
Is this the result of in-house PR?
Is America Melting?
Orville Schell’s portrait of a Nation that says “No, We Can’t”.
Somehow, I think that the US still offers the world the best way forward.
Yes, despite the lobbyists and the money-grubbing pirates in high office, there is still hope.
Don’t give in, America.
Don’t Be Evil: Will Google get out of China?
Go Google, Go!
It’s time. The Chinese government never has any qualms about “doing evil,” so it’s good to see Google stand up for some principles.
Liu Xiaobo: China’s Nelson Mandela?
What a wonderful world. While you were wrapping Christmas presents, China decided to lock up Liu Xiaobo and throw away the key.
Xiaobo’s crime? He drafted Charter 08, which demands the open election of public
officials, freedom of religion and expression, and the abolition of
subversion laws.
His wife’s cell phone mysteriously stopped working so she could not be reached by the press. Nice touch.
See Wikipedia >>
China’s Copenhagen Game
If this is how the New China plays the world, it looks too much like the Old China.
We need a new strategy to deal with this kind of stupidity. Obama can start by inviting the Dalai Lama to the White House.
Seven Degrees Fahrenheit: Why Copenhagen Matters
This is how the government in the UK is helping the public understand the significance of Copenhagen.
In the US we’ve got Sarah “Snake Oil” Palin – who is only too happy to urge a boycott.
Why is she still in the news?
Emotions and Decision-Making
Insights on Anger, fear, and escalation of commitment
via strategy-business.com
“…angry employees are more likely to commit further resources to a failing project or choice. By contrast, fear makes people second-guess themselves and often abandon support for efforts that have gone even slightly off the tracks.”
OK. What happens when you have other emotions like sadness, joy, or just plain happiness? Do you make stupid decisions when you delude yourself? Or does a cynic make better decisions?
IBM: Keys to innovating your business model
This is something that keeps happening with IBM’s FTP server.
I was just trying to download this report: Seizing the advantage. When and how to innovate your business model”…
I have to say, this happens all the time on the site.
What’s going on IBM? This is not exactly the best way to win friends and influence prospects.
P.S. – will let you know if I ever get to the document!
UPDATE: Not sure if this is the same document, but I found it on the UK site.
UPDATE #2: Look what I found at Booz >>
UPDATE #3: And this from EY >>
Orit Gadiesh on Curiosity
How do you encourage curiosity across a global organization?
“Many consultants out there would rather just give answers and are even afraid to ask questions. We deliberately hire people who aren’t like that, even early in their careers, and senior consultants coach them on how to be inquisitive. Sometimes that means asking a client’s managers very difficult questions, really pushing them hard to reveal or do things they’re not comfortable with–getting a CEO to explain lagging sales, for example, or to acknowledge why a competitor’s pulling ahead. Other times that means encouraging constructive dissent–deliberately engaging with people who disagree with you and being willing to probe them on their point of view. That can be tricky, but persistent questioning usually produces the best solutions.”
– Orit Gadiesh in an interview HBR, Sept. 2009
Remember when she debuted? Too bad her purple reign is over…
Bet You Can’t Eat Just One: Addiction as a Strategy
Listen to this:
Junk food elicits addictive behavior in rats similar to the behaviors of rats addicted to heroin, a new study finds. Pleasure centers in the brains of rats addicted to high-fat, high-calorie diets became less responsive as the binging wore on, making the rats consume more and more food. The results, presented October 20 at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting, may help explain the changes in the brain that lead people to overeat.
So is this another example of addiction as a business strategy – similar to what the tobacco companies were doing earlier?
Maybe that’s why the IT geeks have such a hard time implementing Lean IT >>
free2work.org: The End of Business As Usual?
If you haven’t heard about free2work.org, you will. This is part of a growing explosion of consumer-education organizations dedicated to exposing “worst practices” among multinationals.
The hope is that if consumers know what is going on, they will vote with their purchasing power and seek out the companies that are doing good. I’m all for it. Who wouldn’t be? Oh, I forgot about the US Chamber of Commerce…
On the academic side of things, we see the same story emerging:
Rosabeth Moss Kanter‘s latest book, SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good
Maybe Doug Smith was just a little ahead of the times when he wrote On Value and Values: Thinking Differently About We in an Age of Me
Monetizing Bob Marley
Now we see that Bob Marley is going to be sold like soap.
Is this the end of the Marley brand?
Are we going to see Marley toilet seats and diapers?
Here comes Marley Cola, extra sharp.
Or: Marley chewing gum.
Or: Marley underwear:
Or: Marley real estate.
Or: Marley leisure wear.
Or: Marley golf clubs.
Rasta don’t work for no CIA, but he’ll work for a private-equity firm.
Shame on you Rita and Ziggy. Shame.
This could kill Bob for real.
Business Clarity: Who are You?
Step one: Know who you are…
borrowed from Alina Wheeler’s Designing Brand Identity: An Essential Guide for the Whole Branding Team
>>
Wild Phil Townsend: Where is GE’s Open Reverse Innovation?
Phil Townsend wonders why GE hasn’t opened up it’s Reverse Innovation model in his post: Opening up Reverse Innovation >>
Townsend makes a good point:
So why can’t a company like GE follow down this path with “open reverse innovation”
– inviting small companies in India and China to submit their products,
services and ideas to be evaluated by GE for global distribution. Of
course, the open model would require an environment of trust –
but what better way to create goodwill in new markets than to be seen
as a development partner in the China, India, and resource-starved
Africa? A.G. Lafley sits on GE’s board; surely he could help them get started.
Townsend also proposes the formation of innovation collaboratives funded by companies like GE to create a pipeline of new products for GE.
Not a bad idea, if you consider that a recent
McKinsey survey found that 20% of companies have opened up their
innovation processes to employees and customers and they report a 20%
rise in the number of innovations, on average.