"Greater Good": a good, but not great, book on marketing and democracy

"Greater Good: How Good Marketing Makes For Better Democracy" is a book that promises a lot. Inside the front flap it charges that "marketing is more democratic than politics." Its co-author John Quelch is a renowned expert on consumer marketing and professor at Harvard Business School, the author of a thoughtful and incisive blog on marketing. By aiming at dissecting and improving democracy, Quelch and co-author Katherine Jocz seek to elevate marketing to a level currently held by economics--i.e, a discipline that can drive progress of entire nations.

And, while it has many virtues, the book doesn't deliver on that promise. Partially this is because of the very broad topic it takes on. Its scope is the strength and weakness of the book. The book's first part, "Marketing as Democracy" is as good a survey of consumer marketing--its aims, faults and practice--as you could fit into 150 pages. But this means that there's four pages on fairness, six on advertising. As a result, it's a great book if you want to teach people all about marketing at a high level, but not so great if you want to galvanize readers to make their democracies more effective and citizen-focused.

There are sections of the book (for example, the chapter on consumer engagement or the one on marketing government and NGO programs) that could become strong books themselves if they dove more deeply. There are also some important insights, such as this:

...Coke and Pepsi don't sling mud at each other, because if they did, consumer purchases would eventually shift away from both of them to alternative colas and beverages. Both brands want to enlarge the market, not reduce it. However, in politics, market share, and not market size, matters. Negative campaigning may turn off a sizable number of the electorate, but if George Bush sicceeds in making John Kerry marginally less acceptable to the voters who show up on Election Day, Bush comes out ahead. (p.171)

Quelch and Jocz are onto something in terms of using what marketing's good at to improve democracy. While "Greater Good" isn't a home run, I hope they don't give up on the topic. There's more there to study, and, even more interesting, to try out.

If you want a comprehensive introduction to consumer marketing, buy "Greater Good" and read the first 150 pages. If you want to fix what's wrong with democracy, you'll have to wait for another book.

marketing, democracy, reading list

The new media onslaught is making entrepreneurs out of creators

An article from the New York Times earlier this week ("Bridging The Gap, The Sequel") starkly illustrated that venture capitalists from Silicon Valley and creative types from Southern California are having difficulty cooperating to create financial and partnership models for new media.

One of the biggest obstacles, according to the articles, is the Southern Californians' focus on upfront cash rather than long-term equity.

How this situation came to be is easy to understand: when the means of production of creative property were expensive, there was a distinct separation between the "suits," who raised needed capital, and the "talent," who wrote, acted, sang, directed, etc. The suits financed productions and paid the talent, who worked job to job. It was in the talent's interest to get as much of their payment upfront as possible because (1) they didn't know when their next job would come through and (2) the suits could, and wanted to, maintain full ownership of the property.

Now production costs can be much smaller, for music, video, text, etc. Prices for distribution are coming down too as new outlets emerge for digital distribution. And media companies are looking to hedge their risk as the old moneymakers (CDs, DVDs) erode.

As a result, an entire new entrepreneurial class has emerged, between the suits and the talent, combining the ability to raise money, cut deals, etc., with songwriting, producing, or acting. Around this "middle class" is a new set of technology and business enablers that are providing key pieces of the production and distribution infrastructure for these creators. (This edition of the radio program "Fresh Air" discusses some of the new models and companies emerging in the music business. Companies like Indieflix provide distribution services for video/film producers.)

Here's an example of the new world order for music: the LinkedIn profile for Fran Ten of the LA band West Indian Girl:

oversee and run all the departments of the west indian girl business - management, marketing, new media, touring, merchandising, promotions, licensing, legal, accounting, art, etc etc.

music is a business and musicians that dont understand this are at a disadvantage.

this job is just as much a blue collar job as the one i had in high school working at a brake factory in grand rapids, mi. sometimes i think it's even dirtier.

Technology advances have made internet video and mobile entertainment accessible to consumers on a wide scale. The business models are lagging behind. The old way--suits and talent--isn't going to be able to work them out. The "middle class" will have to do it.

(Photo: a still from "Fields of Mudan," the all-time best-selling DVD on Indieflix.)

mobile, media, alliances, technology, music, video, business models, New York Times

What is the attraction of the "I" story?

Many years ago I took summer writing workshops in Provincetown, Mass, at the very tip of Cape Cod. The fiction crowd, of which I was one, looked down on the memoir folks, who were packed like sardines in their classroom, all trying to be the next Mary Karr or Kathryn Harrison. "Autobiography is faker than fiction!" I thought. And, given what we've learned about "memoirs" like James Frey's or recently that of Margaret B. Jones, maybe I had a point.

Yet there's a unique power of the first-person story. Without a measurable distance between author and subject, as there is in biography and fiction, memoir seizes your attention and brings you close, as if the author were sitting on the next barstool telling you the story herself. Reading an actual person's recounting of, "I did this," "I made this choice," or "This happened to me" feels terribly intimate and revealing--ironically, even if it isn't true.

Any other thoughts on the subject?

memoir, narrative, fiction, storytelling, startup

Be careful using "other people's money" to make acquisitions

From The Mistake Bank.

[This story is from Ray Anderson, Founder and Chairman of Interface, Inc., a manufacturer of carpeting and fabrics.]

When we began [Interface], I made the initial investment personally. And then friends came in, then a much larger partner joined in, and we eventually financed the company. And, by the way, the day we had our finance all in hand is the day we count as the birthday of Interface. Up to then, everything is conception and gestation, beginning with the gleam in my eye, perhaps the idea; but it’s only when you have your money in hand that you can truly call yourself a company. And that’s the birthday.

Interface, after getting through that treacherous startup, in the teeth of the worst recession since 1929, really hit a home run year after year, 70 percent compound growth. And then ten years later we went public, and for the first time had access to other people’s money. Investors who bought shares in the stock, our expanded capital base of Interface, enabled us to begin to make acquisitions, and we made acquisitions in Canada, in Northern Ireland, and eventually in the United Kingdom and in Holland. And then in 1998, when the company was fifteen years old, we were a global company. Then we made other acquisitions, made subsequent stock offerings to the public, and had people subscribe to the stock and further expand the capital base, which enabled us to do more. We leveraged other people’s money time and again over the years, so much so that it got to be a little too easy to access it.

And then we made a concentrated series of acquisitions to create a downstream distribution system. We made twenty-nine acquisitions, over a very short period of time, of contract dealers, the people who install and maintain their products. We wanted a captive, owned distribution system, and we invested $150 million of other people’s money, basically by selling stock and doing bond offerings. And it was too easy.

If we’d been spending our own money, we would have thought very hard about those acquisitions. In the long run, they turned out to be a mistake, and six, seven years later we began to dismantle this distribution system and liquidate it, selling the businesses back to the owners or back to the employees. And we might not ever have undertaken that unfortunate series of investments if we’d been investing our own money. We would have questioned it.

Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Press. Excerpted from Lessons Learned: Straight Talk from the World’s Top Business Leaders--Starting a Business. Copyright (c) 2008 Fifty Lessons Limited; All Rights Reserved.

For more information about the "Lessons Learned" series, including a showcase of 50 Lessons video stories, please follow this link.

acquisitions, narrative, capital, financing, startup, entrepreneurism, reading list, Mistake Bank

Channel partners are not your direct sales force

There's a nice post over at the Achieve Market Leadership blog talking about why B2B companies struggle to sell through channel partners. In sum, companies treat channel partners as if they were direct sales forces, instead of treating them like retailers.

A direct sales force sells what the company has. It has no option to sell anything else.

Retailers pick and choose which products they stock, decide where to place them, and simply remove those that don't sell enough. Companies selling through retail realize they need to entice their retailers, either with incentives, great product, or pull-through marketing.

Channel partners often don't have issues with shelf space, but they still decide which products to recommend to customers. If you treat them like a captive sales force, you will be blind to their priorities and issues. As a result, your program won't fit what they need, and they won't push your product.

There's a lot more in the post. It's well worth reading in full.

sales, channels, alliances, indirect sales, B2b

Yoda as a business role model

I've written before about my young kids' obsession with "Star Wars." But now that I've watched all six episodes multiple times, I'm finally getting a grip on the story and how it fits together.

The most interesting character to me is Yoda. Through nearly all the episodes he sits placidly, strokes his chin, and speaks wisdom in his inverted grammar. He thinks, he meditates, he guides. He is the Jedi-est of the Jedis, winning through not fighting.

But at the end of Episode Two: Attack of the Clones, Yoda gets moving. He flies to Geonosis and commands the Clone Army in its battle against Count Dooku's troops. And, finally, with Obi-Wan and Anakin injured and at risk of dying at Dooku's hands, he uses the Force to prevent them being crushed by falling debris and whips out the light saber to battle Dooku, eventually forcing his retreat.

A Jedi needs to think, to prepare. But eventually he has to fight. So it is with leaders of businesses here on Earth. Strategizing, planning, directing are all important. But eventually you've got to roll up the sleeves and get to work side-by-side with your team, whether that's making an important sale, managing a crisis or closing that round of funding.

leadership, strategy, management

Can mobile phones eradicate poverty?

This past winter I had the opportunity to spend a night working at a local homeless shelter. It was an unforgettable night for many reasons, including the memory of huddling around a radio with four other guys after lights out listening to the Giants beat the Packers to go to the Super Bowl. Among everything I experienced, one thing that surprised me was the share of people staying at the shelter that night carrying cell phones. By my reckoning, it was roughly half.

As I thought about it, though, the idea of a homeless mobile-phone subscriber seemed less peculiar. Without a fixed address, the phone provided a means of connecting to the world. Employers could call if there was work available. Family and caregivers could check in. For most of us, the ability to be connected while mobile still seems an extravagance, a luxury. For these guys, it was a lifeline.

An article in today's New York Times magazine brought this back to mind. "Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?" by Sara Corbett trails mobile "user anthropologist" Jan Chipchase of Nokia as he studies how people use cellphones in developing countries and thinks aloud about whether mobile phones could provide a key ingredient in reducing poverty.

Corbett writes:

There are a growing number of economists who maintain that cellphones can restructure developing countries [similar to how just-in-time techniques changed manuracturing]. Cellphones, after all, have an economizing effect. My “just in time” meeting with Chipchase required little in the way of advance planning and was more efficient than the oft-imperfect practice of designating a specific time and a place to rendezvous. He didn’t have to leave his work until he knew I was in the vicinity. Knowing that he wasn’t waiting for me, I didn’t fret about the extra 15 minutes my taxi driver sat blaring his horn in Accra’s unpredictable traffic. And now, on foot, if I moved in the wrong direction, it could be quickly corrected. Using mobile phones, we were able to coordinate incrementally. “Do you see the footbridge?” Chipchase was saying over the phone. “No? O.K., do you see the giant green sign that says ‘Believe in God’? Yes? I’m down to the left of that.”

To someone who has spent years using a mobile phone, these moments are common enough to feel banal, but for people living in a shantytown like Nima[, Ghana] — and by extension in similar places across Africa and beyond — the possibilities afforded by a proliferation of cellphones are potentially revolutionary. Today, there are more than 3.3 billion mobile-phone subscriptions worldwide, which means that there are at least three billion people who don’t own cellphones, the bulk of them to be found in Africa and Asia. Even the smallest improvements in efficiency, amplified across those additional three billion people, could reshape the global economy in ways that we are just beginning to understand.

Corbett writes, "In an increasingly transitory world, the cellphone is becoming the one fixed piece of our identity." Based on my experience at the shelter, I'd have to agree.

Related:
The cure to poverty is connectivity...
Another inspiring thought from Dr. Yunus

[Photo: the Nokia 1200, designed for emerging markets]

mobile, wireless, poverty, New York Times

Follow-up gets results

If you follow this space, you know I talk about books occasionally. Some PR folks have noticed, and now they send me books from time to time which they would like me to talk about. This has led to the happy/sad situation that I have more books in my pile than I can possibly read.

On a couple of occasions, an action has caused me to pull a book from the middle of the pile and read it next. That action was a simple follow-up. "Did you get the book we sent? Will you get a chance to read it soon?"

At that point I felt a little obligation to get to the book quickly. I didn't rearrange my schedule or drop other important things to do it. I just made a note to get to this one as soon as I had a chance. As Bazerman and Malhotra wrote in Negotiation Genius, "Humans tend to reciprocate behavior."

Frequently, I'm asking people to do things on my behalf. I need to remember that respectful follow-up is not hassling people, and it won't make people do things they don't want to do. It does, however, raise your request, even for a moment, to the top of the pile.


follow-up, psychology, public relations

"The Breakthrough Company"--wise advice for the emerging entity

I was prepared to dislike "The Breakthrough Company." The dust jacket is a garish silver. The author photograph reminded me of Svengali, and the first line of his bio read, "At the age of twenty-six, Keith R. McFarland was named associate dean of one of the nation's leading business schools." And continued, "He and his family live just downhill from the ski lifts at Snowbird, Utah."

This was a cover that screamed at you: THIS IS IMPORTANT, VITAL, DON'T MISS IT. (I mean, how could you not listen to someone who lives just downhill from the ski lifts at Snowbird?)

But you can't judge a book by its cover, nor its author bio, and "The Breakthrough Company" is a serious, substantial and useful effort. McFarland and his colleagues at McFarland Strategy Partners set out to give the "Good to Great" treatment to a different segment of companies--those that graduated from entrepreneurial status (around $10 million in revenue) to substantial size ($250 million to upwards of $1 billion).

They surveyed 1500 companies and from those picked the nine best performers, then reverse-engineered these companies to settle on six characteristics that stood out. And while I've posted before on the limitations of this type of "best practice" approach, it's to McFarland's credit that he also plays down the value of copying the template: "This is not intended to be a recipe book."

Also, the companies he is aiming at helping are still in their formative stages. A company with 250 people can still be shaped. One with 5,000 is much harder to reorient.

And with that, the characteristics McFarland highlights--e.g., "crowning the company," or putting the company's needs and priorities above the founder's--are important, and rare in companies big and small.

My favorite chapter is titled, "Enlisting Insultants," in which McFarland discusses how vital it is for growing companies to have people who can give voice to the minority opinion--either critiquing the conventional wisdom or championing an unpopular initiative. This view echoes those of Gary Hamel in "The Future of Management" as well as Traci Fenton's efforts to promote organizational democracy.

As might be apparent, McFarland can also turn a phrase. The book is well-written, with lots of great stories from the companies' leaders. And from its prominent position in my local Barnes & Noble's business section, it's probably selling a few copies.

In sum, there's a lot to learn from on an important subject. And don't let the cover bug you--the dust jacket is easily removed.

Related:
On Gary Hamel's "The Future of Management"
Shop Talk Podcast #3 - Traci Fenton on democratic workplaces

democracy, leadership, management, entrepreneurism, growth, reading list

Google's groundwork for its innovation machine is years old

Google is the company to emulate these days, and who can argue? The company does things on its own terms, earns enviable profits, and oh, that stock price.

But as smart as Google's engineers are today, they benefit greatly from decisions and investments made in the company's early days. That's one of the messages from "Reverse Engineering Google's Innovation Machine" (link) in the April Harvard Business Review.

The authors, Bala Iyer and Thomas Davenport of Babson College, point out many reasons for Google success at innovation (culture of experimentation, the 20% rule, etc.). But one reason stuck out for me.

Because of Google's highly-scalable, worldwide information platform, new products can be tested and rolled out extremely cheaply. The authors write:

Google’s infrastructure is well suited to executing an entire product-development life cycle rapidly and efficiently. Google engineers prototype new applications on the platform; if any of these begin to get users’ attention, developers can launch beta versions to see whether the company’s vast captive customer base responds enthusiastically. If one of the applications becomes a hit, Google’s enormous “cloud” of computing capability can make room for it.

Google's platform as a distinctive capability is not new. I vividly recall three things about first using Google in the late 1990's. First, the relevance of the results (searching on "Ford" got you Ford's website, instead of some other site); second, the simplicity of the interface. And, third, the speed of the results.

In the original interface, before text ads, Google prominently displayed how quickly search results came up--in some fraction of a second. Back then, it was some feat. Even now, with most screens coming up with banner ads and other content loading from distant servers, most websites take some seconds to display completely. Google remains blindingly fast in comparison.

And one nice side effect of that early focus on speed--now it's easy and cheap to roll out new applications.


innovation, Google, infrastructure, Harvard Business Review

Is your marketing department confused about web2.0? Read this

The one nearly universal feeling of companies dealing with the changes that web2.0 has made to marketing is utter bewilderment. I participated in a project to assess corporate blogs last year and I wouldn’t give any company I looked at better than a “C.” In fact, most of them would get incompletes: they had no blogs at all.

Never mind wikis, Facebook, Second Life, YouTube, Twitter, Digg, etc., etc.

So it’s very timely that Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research have written “Groundswell,” a book that illuminates what web2.0 means to everyday businesses. In straightforward language, and buttressed by primary research into how various groups participate in web2.0, Li and Bernoff define the most important web2.0 technologies, show how consumers use them, and lay out how companies can encourage and participate in the conversations about themselves and their products.

At the outset, Li and Bernoff define six overlapping types of web2.0 users & nonusers (creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, inactives) and show their representation in various segments. For example, Democrats have more web2.0 users across the board than Republicans. Japanese Fujitsu PC owners are far more likely to be collectors (e.g., content taggers or subscribers to RSS feeds) than NEC’s PC customers.

Through these examples, the authors crisply demonstrate that companies need to understand the web2.0 profiles of their customers, so as to understand, ultimately, how to engage them in productive conversation.

Case studies appear throughout the book, both success stories (Blendtec’s “Will It Blend” videos) and failures (the short-lived blog of Unica’s Chief Marketing Officer). To satisfy old-line executives (especially CFOs), they include pro forma business cases for several web2.0 projects—including laying out the upfront and ongoing costs of these initiatives.

Over and over, Li and Bernoff emphasize the need, when using these technologies, to listen, and not to shout. To be transparent, and to be authentic. Whether this is possible with traditional companies, in which desiring to control the message is deeply ingrained, remains to be seen.

---------------------------------

Examples of web2.0 user types defined in “Groundswell”:
Creators – blog writers, amateur YouTube videographers
Critics – blog commenters, Amazon product reviewers
Collectors – del.icio.us taggers
Joiners – myspace and Facebook users
Spectators – blog readers, forum readers

Related:
Groundswell blog
Corporate IT maximum-security is damaging innovation
How enterprise 2.0 adds value to the connections between workers

social networking, information technology, web2.0, marketing, blogging, virtual communities, reading list

Bosses, choose your words carefully

From The Mistake Bank.

[The Mistake Bank has received permission to publish excerpts from the Harvard Business School Press/50Lessons series "Lessons Learned: Straight Talk from the World's Top Business Leaders," The books are full of great stories, including some very useful mistake stories. Our first is from Paul Anderson, Chairman of Spectra Energy]

As I progressed in my career and got into increasingly more responsible or powerful roles, …it was almost like my words took on the power of the position, and things that were casual before were no longer casual. I had my first example of this when I was a manager. It was fairly early in my career, and a woman named Sarah had come in. I was running a planning organization, and Sarah came in to me and said, “Look, I don’t have any background in planning—I’m from the IT group—but I would love to join your organization. I’ll work hard to learn what I need to learn to do a good job. I will strive to do anything you need done. Just give me a chance.”

I said, “Well, that sounds fair to me. Why don’t you join the organization? I’ll give you a year. At the end of the year you will either be a planner and contributing; or, if it’s not working out, you can go back to the IT group, and we’ll assume that it was a nice try but it didn’t work out.”

So she joined the organization and she was outstanding; she was the best new employee we had that year. She took on everything; she learned. She became the “go-to” person—everybody came to her with their issues. She was a star, there was just no question; she was doing an outstanding job.

And I thought, “Well, this has to be one of the best moves that I’ve ever participated in,” and I was quite comfortable that things were working out nicely. But at the end of a year, she came into my office, and she was in tears. I said, “Sarah, what’s wrong?” And she said, “Well, I don’t understand why it’s not working out. At the end of a year, you said you’d tell me if it was working out and you haven’t told me that, so I must assume that it’s not working out and I’m going to have to go back to IT.” I was flabbergasted, and of course I told her, “Hey, you’re doing a great job!”

But it struck me that I’d made a casual comment: “…in a year we’ll know.” She had gone back to her office and marked her calendar, and, by God, at the end of a year she expected me to walk into her office with a decision. That casual comment was very powerful to her, and so insignificant to me, that it really struck me that I had to be very careful in making comments as I went along.

Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Press. Excerpted from Lessons Learned: Straight Talk from the World’s Top Business Leaders--Managing Your Career. Copyright (c) 2007 Fifty Lessons Limited; All Rights Reserved.

For more information about the "Lessons Learned" series, including a showcase of 50 Lessons video stories, please follow this link.


management, narrative, leadership, communications, oral communications, organizational behavior, Mistake Bank

Choreographer Twyla Tharp on the usefulness of failure

In this month's Harvard Business Review, editor Diane Coutu interviews choreographer Twyla Tharp (free link), creator of avant-garde dances as well as the Broadway show "Movin' Out." Tharp mentions some important thoughts on failure.

If you do only what you know and do it very, very well, chances are you won't fail. You'll just stagnate, and your work will get less and less interesting, and that's failure by erosion. True failure is a mark of accomplishment in the sense that something new & different was tried. Ideally, the best way to fail is in private.... I have also sometimes failed in public, and that's very painful. But failing, even in this way, is not useless. It can force you to get yourself together and to produce something new.

From The Mistake Bank

art, creativity, learning, failure, Mistake Bank, Harvard Business Review

CTIA Day 2 - a look back

broadband, technology, wireless, mobile, CTIA, Wireless 2008, Las Vegas

Most interesting discoveries of CTIA Wireless 2008

As I wait in the Las Vegas airport for my flight home, here are the most interesting discoveries I made at this year's show.

Chargebox - they sell a neat vending machine to recharge cellphones.

Wildwave - a Canadian company that creates and distributes mobile digital content.

Jygy - an SMS-based social network tool (disclosure: I know some of the leadership of Jygy, though this week was my first look at the system)

dial2do - one of several voice-to-text companies at the show, their software is focused on processing oral commands, such as composing and posting Twitter updates completely by voice.

broadband, content, technology, wireless, mobile, CTIA, Wireless 2008, Las Vegas

Free, unsolicited product management advice for Verizon Wireless

As I mentioned yesterday, I am using EV-DO to connect to the internet here in Vegas for CTIA. It's more economical and reliable than the hotels' and convention center's WiFi hotspots. What I didn't say is that the way I contract for this service is convoluted and actually, on my analysis, loses money for Verizon. Details to follow.

It's got me feeling a bit guilty, so I would like to offer them some free advice. If they implement my ideas and wish to share perhaps 10% of their incremental profits on the change, I'd be happy to accept. [VZW, you can email me at inquiry (at) caddellinsightgroup (dot) com for my PayPal info.]

Here's the situation with EV-DO. I have a Blackberry, using a 10MB per month plan costing $24.95 per month on top of my voice subscription. This is fine for emailing and web browsing through the Blackberry, but not enough to support what I'm doing this week--blogging, video uploading, etc.

For that application, VZW requires I buy unlimited data access for $49.95 per month, and on top of that buy tethered modem service (that allows me to use the Bberry as a modem for my computer) for an additional $15 per month.

As a result, it would cost me $39.95 extra per month to subscribe to this EV-DO service. Except for the fact that I need it for perhaps 15 days per year. The rest of the time, cheap or free WiFi hotspots do the job. So I can't justify an ongoing subscription for this service.

But here's the thing: VZW allows me to sign up for the service, then, when I don't need it anymore, I call them back to cancel. The billing is ugly and almost incomprehensible, but at the end of the day I only get billed for the days I use EV-DO, at the rate of about $1.33 per day. A bargain for me.

But not for VZW. Here's a litany of costs they incur, each time I set up the service:

Calls to tech support: 2 @ $10 (one call to activate, one call to deactivate)
Letters informing me of a change in service: 2 @ $2.50
Incremental billing costs for changes, prorates, etc.: unknown

Total: at least $25

For this trip, I will use the service for four days. Meaning VZW will get incremental revenue of $5.33, but spend $25, for a marginal contribution margin of ($19.67). Ugh.

Here's my idea. VZW should offer a daily plan. [Virtually every other wireless ISP offers such a plan.] I would pay $5 per day for that plan. Have the signup be online rather than through tech support, meaning the incremental cost should be near zero. Have me sign up for exactly the number of days I need, and have deactivation be done automatically by the ordering system.







Related post: "Worst Practices in Product Management"

product management, mobile, wireless, customer service, packaging, pricing, technical support, Verizon Wireless

CTIA Day 1 - It's Vegas, baby

As Dan Meyer pointed out in RCR today, CTIA is just more fun this year. Is it the Vegas factor?



broadband, technology, wireless, mobile, CTIA, Wireless 2008, Las Vegas

EV-DO is a bit of a miracle

I'm in Las Vegas for CTIA, and so it's appropriate that I'm connecting on the web via Verizon's EV-DO service. (WiFi coverage in the hotels is lousy, plus it costs $12.99 per day.)

My first CTIA was New Orleans in 1992, and if I recall correctly, McCaw Cellular began developing the CDPD (cellular digital packet data) service around that time. That service didn't do much of anything, but now, sixteen years later, mobile broadband is a fixture.

broadband, technology, wireless, mobile, CTIA,
Wireless 2008

An excellent web customer service practice

I got this email from the Wall Street Journal today:

Dear Subscriber,

We see that delivery of your Wall Street Journal was scheduled
to resume today after a temporary suspension, and are
following up to check that it did.

If you received your paper today -- great! No need to respond.

If you did not receive your Journal, please report your missed
delivery by clicking here:

https://services.wsj.com/Gryphon/resolveDeliveryProblem.dj

We will investigate to make sure you don't miss another day of
The Wall Street Journal.

Thank you for using Services.wsj.com to manage your Wall
Street Journal account.

I was so happy they followed up with me. There was no delivery problem, but if there had been, Dow Jones had made it so much easier to manage.


customer service, ecommerce

A new mistake story video from The Mistake Bank

When I got overloaded at one job and was allowed to hire an assistant, I thought my troubles were over. But I had just pushed them onto my new hire, and they came back to me pretty soon.


Find more videos like this on The Mistake Bank


management, leadership, tasking, organizational behavior, Mistake Bank

Chef David Chang--in a weird way, a leadership role model

On vacation, you're supposed to catch up on your reading. But when you're chasing five- and seven-year-old boys around all day--beach, fishing, mini-golfing, etc.--till they finally crash at 9pm, you get even further behind. Which is why it took me this long to get around to reading the recent New Yorker profile on wacky restaurateur David Chang (sorry, only abstract available on line).

What interest could he be to Shop Talk readers? For one, the author Larissa
MacFarquhar cannily focuses on Chang's many eccentricities and (self-described) weaknesses. So much so that you wonder how he could manage to get out of bed in the morning, never mind start two (going on three) highly-successful New York restaurants.

Secondly, through his nearly nonstop chatter, Chang lets us in on his biggest secrets to success. Read this:

[Chang said,] In four years, we've gone from this small-ass Noodle Bar to this f-ing big restaurant, when the whole goal in the beginning was, let's serve better food than that place across the street. I know we've won awards, but it's not because we're doing something special--I believe it's really because we care more than the next guy.

And this:

[Chang said,] Recently, over at Ssam Bar, a sous-chef closed improperly, there were a lot of mistakes, and I was livid and I let this guy have it. About a week later, I found out that it wasn't him, he wasn't even at the restaurant that night. But what he said was, "I'm sorry, it will never happen again." And you know what? I felt like an asshole for yelling at him, but, more important, I felt like, Wow, this is what we want to build our company around: guys that have this level of integrity.... If we start being accountable not only for our own actions but for everyone else's actions, we're gonna do some awesome s--t.

And this:

Cory Lane began setting up for service: a cork at each place to rest chopsticks on, then a folded napkin, then a menu tucked inside the napkin, then a water glass. He measured to make sure that each napkin was exactly one thumb-length from the edge of the counter. Then he crouched down at the end of the row and squinted to check that everything was lined up.

Managing the details, accountability, teamwork. It works in the restaurant industry. It works most everywhere.

(Photo: the interior of Ko, from the restaurant's website.)

management, leadership, teamwork, New Yorker

Innovative Irish company gets the red out

Traditionally, photography has been an edit-after-the-fact art form. In the film era, this meant taking lots and lots of pictures and discarding the ones that didn't come out right. Early digital photography has used editing programs like Photoshop to eliminate red-eye or improve lighting after photos have been downloaded to a PC.

An innovative Irish company, FotoNation, has developed technology that allows photo improvement to occur before the picture is actually taken. As profiled in today's Wall Street Journal, the company has developed a compact software program that eliminates red-eye in flash photographs before images are written to disk, among other innovations. Nikon and Kodak are building FotoNation's technology into their digital cameras.

Another interesting point about FotoNation: despite being founded in Galway, Ireland, the founder is Israeli and the chief engineer is Romanian--another example of the growing heterogenizing of Ireland's technology sector.

technology, innovation, software, photography, Wall Street Journal

Mistake Bank update

The Mistake Bank is three weeks old tomorrow. And like any infant that age, it's still hard to know what it will look like when it grows up. Yet there have been hundreds of visits, several dozen members joined, and nearly that many stories shared.

Many people I've talked to are intrigued, but a bit wary. What if I don't have any stories to share?

Let me make it clear, then. With the Mistake Bank, lurkers are welcome. Please sign up and visit often. You never know what you'll find. [Perhaps an embarrassing moment or two.]

If you want to share a story, but don't know how, take a look at what's already there to use as a model. Or do it your own way.

[If you happen to be at Wireless 2008 next week, and want to share a story, email me at inquiry (at) caddellinsightgroup (dot) com. I'll be there with my new Flip video camera and would be delighted to record it for you.]

The experiences, discussions and interactions I've had since the Mistake Bank went live have only reinforced my belief that we can build it into a useful, fun resource for all kinds of people.

Won't you consider joining?

mistakes, Mistake Bank, learning, social networking

US cable giants find a way into wireless

People have been wondering how the cable companies would establish a wireless presence (forget for a moment that they owned part of Sprint PCS but sold it off years ago). Several of them established the Pivot program, with Comcast, Time Warner, etc., acting as value-added resellers of Sprint's network. But in my experience with the cable companies, they like to own the network. Leasing is not their cup of tea. Given that, it was a bit of a surprise that they chose not to bid in the recent 700MHz wireless auction.

Now comes the news that Time Warner, Comcast and Bright House Networks (three members of the Pivot consortium) are in discussions to invest in a Sprint-Clearwire WiMax joint venture. Rumors of a tie-up between the two most prominent WiMax service providers have swirled for months, especially given Sprint's recent troubles.

This is a perfect situation for the cablecos, in my view. They get access to a full near-nationwide network, cost-sharing, and a bit of a head start on the big wireless players Verizon and AT&T on 4G.

Looks like there's another nationwide broadband competitor. Hooray!

broadband, technology, wireless, WiMax, cable,

Wright Brothers set the standard for entrepreneurial thinking

I've been reading a lot about the Wright Brothers this week, given our stopover at Kitty Hawk on the way to South Carolina for spring break. The novella-length Wikipedia entry was interesting reading on the Blackberry web browser while we headed toward North Carolina at 11pm. [As soon as I get a chance to edit the video I shot at Kitty Hawk, I'll post that as well.]

Among the interesting resources I found was a fifty-year-old article in the Atlantic Monthly, which excerpts "Miracle at Kitty Hawk: The Letters of Orville and Wilbur Wright," using a sample of the letters to outline the brothers' career. The article says this, about the period when the Wrights discovered that certain aeronautical assumptions which they and others had taken for granted were invalid:

Wilbur Wright said, on their way home after the 1901 gliding experiments, that he didn't think man would fly in a thousand years. In a way, though, as Orville Wright said long afterward, it was encouraging to learn that the work of predecessors could not be relied upon. It meant that more knowledge was needed, rather than that flight was impossible.

This passage stopped me in my tracks. Discovering that Lilienthal's lift projections, on which they had based their glider designs for years, were erroneous did not discourage the Wrights--it did just the opposite.

Which is a brilliant summary of the entrepreneurial mind.

(Photo: the Wright Brothers' 1901 glider. Courtesy of NASA.)

innovation, entrepreneurism, persistence,

Old technologies hang on for decades

What do radio, mainframe computers and photocopiers have in common?

They were all predicted to die a quick death at the hands of a successor technology, and all are still here today.

The New York Times profiles the venerable IBM mainframe, still a multi-billion-dollar business (not that any CIO would admit publicly to buying one), which has hung on through the minicomputer revolution (remember DEC?), the PC revolution and the client-server revolution.

According to the Times article, "survivor technologies" retain certain compelling benefits that the successors do not offer. Hence, for certain niches, they continue to provide value. For radio, it is the idea of "audio wallpaper," entertainment that's less distracting than video--i.e., good while driving or working. For the mainframe, it was the ability to retain billions of dollars of software investment while taking advantage of hardware's increased price-performance. Photocopiers offer easy-to-handle and share hardcopy documents that the paperless office can't provide. (I worked for a year without a copier and was that ever a pain.)

So consider this: the next time you read that a certain technology will be obsolete within five years, you may want to buy some stock in the dinosaur.

(Photo: an IBM mainframe that is likely no longer in service.)

innovation, product management, marketing, New York Times

News item: a media company grows by studying its customers

In March's Harvard Business Review, Richard Harrington, CEO of Thomson Corporation, discusses how the large financial-media company reinvented its strategy ("Transforming Strategy One Customer At A Time" - free link). With his coauthor, Anthony Tjan of the Parthenon Group, Harrington shows how Thomson, by changing its focus from the standard segmentation used by its industry to that of specific end-users, was able to better understand its market position and identify attractive new product features.

This epiphany--innovation and differentiation through understanding how end-customers utilize a product and how they do their jobs--would not be surprising to Procter & Gamble, or to Clayton Christensen, who wrote about this back in 2005 ("Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure" link - $$).

One question is why this was so novel to Thomson. My guess is that it relates to how media companies view themselves. They have grown up as mass distributors, sending standardized product out to customers via newsstands, television, radio. Focusing on specific end-customer segments was time-consuming and unnecessary when there was always a new growth medium out there. Now, with growth stagnating for most media companies, they find they are no different from the packaged-goods manufacturers who sponsor their television programs.

To wit: they need customers, and customers need a job done.

Related:
How to market a product that isn't a product
Shop Talk Podcast #4 - Tony Ulwick on Determining What Customers Really Want...

segmentation, media, innovation, marketing, Harvard Business Review

Corporate IT maximum-security is damaging innovation

Exhibit A: A fellow I serve on a board with recently got a new job with a city government. I asked him for his updated contact information and he said, "I can't give out my work email address. They don't like anything that's not 100% city business done on their computers."

Exhibit B: another friend who works for a large telecom company tried to access my new site The Mistake Bank from work and found that corporate IT had blocked all social-networking sites.

Exhibit C (counter-example): Google's CIO, interviewed in today's Wall Street Journal, says the company's policy allows users to download their own software, supports multiple operating systems and uses public resources (like their own blogger.com) for work-related activities.

Andrew McAfee, for one, has often pointed the finger at internal IT shops for inhibiting the adoption of transformative Enterprise 2.0 technologies. Accurately so, in my opinion.

Why? Reasonable concerns regarding security risks and productivity impacts have spawned draconian, corporate-wide policies that essentially prevent employees from learning anything except that which is corporately-sanctioned.

A company worrying about people frittering away time on Facebook simply closes off access--and thereby prevents employees from keeping track of and developing valuable contacts that can help them deliver better results in their jobs.

Obsessing over use of work IT resources only for work--such as the concern about non-work-related emails my friend encountered--forgets that more and more work concerns things outside the company--learning about the issues facing customers and partners, researching competitors, understanding innovation. It also conveniently forgets that knowledge work frequently spills over the boundaries of the work day--thereby forcing some non-work activities into the hours of 8-5.

In sum, while this throttling of external IT resources for more and more companies may or may not make them more secure and productive--it certainly limits the horizons of employees, depriving them of oxygen needed for learning, innovative thinking, and being a whole person.

And is that a reasonable price to pay?

Related:
How enterprise 2.0 adds value to the connections between workers

(Photo: Alcatraz Island from amagill via Flickr Creative Commons)

social networking, information technology, web2.0, enterprise2.0, productivity, security, innovation

Happy St. Patrick's Day

Today I'm wearing a green rugby shirt with "IRELAND" emblazoned on the front. My parents gave it to me recently. As I went to put it on this morning, I looked at the tag. It read proudly, "100% unoriginal." Very Irish.

Happy St. Patrick's Day to all the Caddells, McShanes, Mallons, Reillys, McFaddens, McAndrews and O'Connells.

(Photo: the 100% original Irish rugby shirt)

More learning from mistakes

From the New York Times, Sunday March 16, an interview with 1-800-Flowers.com CEO James McCann:

In 1986 I bought the assets of a failed floral company in Texas called 800-Flowers and took that name. I thought I was smarter than everyone else and neglected to hire lawyers and bankers to do due diligence. I unknowingly signed for all liabilities, which I later learned was a debt of $7 million.

People advised me to file for bankruptcy. Then my grandmother took me aside and said: “This bankruptcy thing? We don’t do that. Find another way.” I worked like an animal to get out of that hole....

If you look at highly successful people, they make the same number of mistakes as others, but they recover quickly. They don’t sit around moaning about what they’ve done wrong.

A more complete retelling of this same mistake can be found in this article in Inc Magazine.

mistakes, Mistake Bank, learning, due diligence, acquisitions, lawyers, bankers

Scott Berkun on learning from mistakes

While working on The Mistake Bank, I found this essay by Scott Berkun, author of books like "The Myths of Innovation." Upon reading it, I was struck by how well-articulated his arguments are and how closely his thinking relates to what we're trying to do with The Mistake Bank.

It starts off like this:

You can only learn from a mistake after you admit you’ve made it. As soon as you start blaming other people (or the universe itself) you distance yourself from any possible lesson. But if you courageously stand up and honestly say “This is my mistake and I am responsible” the possibilities for learning will move towards you. Admission of a mistake, even if only privately to yourself, makes learning possible by moving the focus away from blame assignment and towards understanding. Wise people admit their mistakes easily. They know progress accelerates when they do.

And there's lots more. The section entitled "How to Handle Complex Mistakes" is particularly relevant--as is his discussion on the importance of keeping a sense of humor about yourself. Please give Scott's essay a read, and please visit The Mistake Bank to see some stories and create some yourself!

Related:
Announcing The Mistake Bank
Mistake Bank #12 - Don't Forget About Support!
Great Innovation Requires...Acceptance of Mistakes
Learning From Mistakes, Part 72

mistakes, Mistake Bank, learning, complexity

Shop Talk Podcast #6 - Todd Mittleman on Honda's Fuel Cell car

[UPDATE March 2009. New podcast with Todd Mittleman can be found on our new Customers Are Talking blog.]

On this edition of the Shop Talk Podcast, I talk once again with Todd Mittleman, Director of Environmental & Safety Public Relations for Honda, this time about the Clarity FCX, Honda's fuel cell car for the mass market, to be launched sometime in the summer of 2008. (You can find our first interview here.)

If you've ever wondered what on earth a fuel-cell is and how it can power a car, and how you can drive in Southern California's carpool lanes with no one else in your car, you'll want to listen.

Please right-click and save here to download the podcast.

automobiles, environment, technology, fuel cell, green technology, podcast, corporate social responsibility

A must-read for people who present

I have sat through, by my estimate, more than a thousand lousy presentations. You know the ones: someone in a suit stands at a lectern and dryly reads PowerPoint bullets for a half-hour, or an hour, or sometimes even longer. The slides use a garish corporate template and contain unreadably-small text, save for a few lame clip-art images. Ugh.

Even worse, I've given hundreds of similar presentations.

Luckily for me and other poor presenters, Garr Reynolds has been providing expert critique, tips and examples to help people present better on his Presentation Zen website. (I've written about Garr's work a number of times: 1, 2, 3, 4.)

Now, he's assembled his ideas into a book.

As you might expect, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery is beautifully designed and laid out. With lots of white space, beautiful pictures, and a nice variety of page layouts, it reinforces its theme by its very look. [Similar to Edward Tufte's books, Presentation Zen is fun to flip through just to look at the pictures.]

If you didn't think you could say more with less text, or didn't know how to find cool photographs that would actually enhance your message, or didn't know how to make your subject as compelling to the audience as it is to you, Presentation Zen has insight you need.

While Reynolds echoes themes and specific advice he's presented in his blog, the accrual of the information between the book's covers has a more powerful effect than reading the same material over a long period of time in several blog posts. For example, throughout the book he shows side-by-side comparisons of poor slides and improved ones, or shows a number of different ways of conveying the same information with different slide designs. By the time you get to the end, the message is clear.

In other words, if you read Reynolds' blog regularly, you should still invest in the book. And if you don't read the blog, you should buy the book right away. And start applying the lessons today. [Please! I'm going to another seminar at the beginning of April.]

storytelling, design, presentation, PowerPoint, reading list

New version of "Flight of the Gossamer Condor"

A few months ago, I made mention of the passing of inventor Paul MacCready. Recently, I received this email from Ben Shedd, the director of "The Flight of the Gossamer Condor," the story of MacCready's efforts to create a human-powered aircraft. With his permission, I include it here (slightly edited).

I made the film THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR and it was great to find it mentioned in your blog. Paul MacCready's story has had a big impact on my life as well and I appreciated your comments.

For the 30th Anniversary of the Gossamer Condor's human-powered flight into aviation history, the film was remastered in HD and digitally restored from a preservation film print made by the Academy Film Archive. I would be glad to send you a preview copy of the DVD. In the past year, the film is now required in a national high school engineering program called PROJECT LEAD THE WAY and it is my hope that a whole new generation of teenagers will be inspired like you were to design and create their own inventions from seeing the Gossamer Condor's story.

Thanks, Ben, for writing, and for those interested in checking out the new 30th anniversary DVD, click here.

(Photo: MacCready's plane the Gossamer Albatross (the successor to the Gossamer Condor), courtesy of NASA)

innovation movies aviation

Announcing the Mistake Bank--please join us

"From mistakes we learn; from successes, not so much." Meet the Robinsons.

The Mistake Bank is a social network for "war stories," or brief narratives of mistakes that people have made. Members share videos or blog posts recounting mistakes that they have made in their life, and discuss other members' contributions. All are welcome. Click here to visit the Mistake Bank, or here if you're ready to join.

Better e-commerce another way: invite related sites

Building on yesterday's post on e-commerce and making sites more effective, today's Wall Street Journal profiles Etsy.com, a selling site for handmade goods, and its embrace of independent related sites that connect users and allow them to share information (link to article - $$).

The article, by Raymund Flandez, puts a particular focus on We Love Etsy, a small social network of Etsy sellers. Through We Love Etsy, sellers share insights on how to use Etsy.com more effectively, highlight products they like, etc. The community helps otherwise lone sellers connect--a bit like an online Chamber of Commerce.

There's additional stickiness as well: if someone is a member of Etsy.com and We Love Etsy, she has that much more invested in the Etsy platform, and she'll be less likely to defect if another e-commerce site comes calling.

Etsy.com, for its part, approves of these independent sites (though they have begun to ask sites to request permission to use logos and trademarks). Rob Kalin, Etsy's founder, is quoted saying this:

"What it means for us is that we don't have to spend anywhere as much money on marketing because there are all of these avenues for people to spread the word and talk about what we do."

If there's a downside to these user-created sites, it's that their independence makes it difficult for Etsy to control their message. But by supporting a free exchange of information, Etsy retains a channel to the candid feelings of their sellers, and underscores its own authenticity.

Anyway, haven't we come to realize that controlling messages is at best twentieth-century marketing practice?

websites, ecommerce, marketing, Wall Street Journal

e-commerce sites: more, related content is better

The March Harvard Business Review has a must-read article for anyone who sells via a web site ("In E-Commerce, More Is More" - free link). The authors, Andreas Eisingerich of the Tanaka Business School and Tobias Kretschmer of the Munich School of Management, studied e-commerce sites, their users and owners.

According to Eisingerich and Kretschmer, uncluttered sites, personalized shopping recommendations and clear, relevant product information are no longer differentiators. The most successful e-commerce sites now offer, in addition to merchandise, broad content that connects with their audiences.

These sites (examples include Porsche and Ralph Lauren) surround their products with lifestyle information that brings their audience back again and again. While only a quarter of the sites surveyed used this technique, the best-performing companies owned them. Users also had the highest likelihood of revisiting the site.

Ralph Lauren's site includes RL Quarterly, a magazine with travel, sports and leisure profiles that appeal to Ralph Lauren customers and reinforce the sporty, elegant image of the clothes. Ralph Lauren ads appear throughout, and the top of each page is a menu for different categories of merchandise. The store is never more than one click away.

It seems a small step beyond this to add the ability to interact with like-minded people. Now that could be a sticky site indeed.

(Photo: a picture of Little Palm Island, Florida, from RL Magazine)

websites, ecommerce, marketing, Harvard Business Review

Waiting for the call to come in

A few weeks ago I was traveling in the northwest of England and I had an occasion to take a cab from my hotel to the office where I was working. The taxi driver who picked me up was very upset. He started cursing out the dispatcher and his terrible luck and I was ready for him to start cursing me out too. He tore through intersections in a futile effort to make up time. I was a bit shocked, but rather than engage with him, I just heard him out. "This is such a low F-ing fare and it's on an F-ing company account." And that he had to come from a long way to pick me up and that it was in the middle of F-ing rush hour. He saw the prospect of working for an hour just to make a few pounds and was very upset with that.

Eventually he calmed down. He began to talk about his life. He liked to work out. His girlfriend had just had an ectopic pregnancy and was recovering from surgery. At one point during the conversation he kind of took a breath and turned around to me and said: "You sit at your corner waiting for the call from the dispatch. You don't know when it's gonna come. You don't know how good the fare's gonna be. You don't know whether you're gonna make enough money that day to be able to support your family."

And he said, "You know, I'd really much rather have a proper job on an oil rig in the North Sea. That's something I hope to do some day."

It made me think of entrepreneurs. The taxi driver was one. He was waiting for the call to come in. That's the way he had to work. What a terrible feeling of powerlessness.

As I left the cab, I wished him good luck in finding his job. And he said, "Thanks mate." And drove off.

spoken through SpinVox

entrepreneurism, spoken post, narrative, travel

Witnessing the "gamer disposition"

One of Harvard Business Review's 2008 breakthrough ideas identified "The Gamer Disposition" as a hallmark of high-impact business performers of the future. Gamers had certain attributes (bottom-line orientation, comfort with change, etc.) that would help make them successful in business.

"The Gamer Disposition" was notable because it played against the stereotypes most businesspeople have of gamers: slackers and loners who would make low-value employees. Also, the authors, John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas, made the point (indirectly) that the gamer qualities were not found in many current employees.

As I've observed my two young gamers battle "LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga" these last two months, I've seen some of the gamer disposition in action. Here's what I've seen:

1. Unafraid to fail - getting terminated by Count Dooku a hundred times didn't dissuade my guys from trying again.
   
   
2. Do rather than research - there is no user's manual for the game, and the kids didn't want one. They preferred to learn by doing again and again. (Me: "How did you learn you had to drop the gate on the Rancor to kill him?" My five-year-old: shoulder shrug, "We just tried it and it worked!")
   
   
3. Resourceful - they'll ask their friends how they overcome certain obstacles, and share their learnings with pride.
   
   
4. Ever-learning - the biggest prize they get from playing the game is the ability to open up new parts of the game; to become a beginner again. Expertise isn't that interesting to them. "What's next?" is.
   

The above practices seem useful to me in navigating any complex business context. It will be interesting to see how business has changed twenty years hence, when "the gamer disposition" is no longer the exception, but the rule among employees.

videogames, gaming, learning, organizational behavior, Harvard Business Review