Emergence Marketing: human resources Archives

August 1, 2007

Overprotecting our youth can be disastrous for their education

It is disturbing to see how technology-phobic parents and teachers can impose restrictions on all of our kids which can result in missed education opportunities, or worse strange behavior towards technology and the Internet.

One such example appeared on the BBC News web site today, where they report that teachers have called for web sites such as YouTube to be shut down as part of efforts to prevent pupils and staff being bullied. Wow - how dangerously stupid! I mean, cannot they just adapt new techniques to avoid bullying online instead of calling for the shutdown of those sites? I bet you the next thing they will do is to prohibit access to YouTube and sites like it for all the kids in the their schools - a really dumb move.

That is exactly what happened to my son. He has been to computer camp over summer for years now. The first year they let them do whatever they wanted on the web. Then they started prohibiting online games during recess times. It got progressively worse to the point that this year they can no longer go on the web. A computer camp without being allowed to surf the web - that is almost as bad as a tennis camp without tennis courts. What are they thinking?

I can just see some worried parents who have no clue what the web is all about, outside of the sensationalized (and disgusting) stories of the pedophiles who find their victims online as promoted by Dateline NBC and other such programs, asking the school to not allow their child to access the web for fear of being stalked or being approached by bad people. This being a very litigious society, the school lawyers are probably choosing to have all access prohibited rather than just limiting access to those kids whose parents are clearly clueless. And the unfortunate result is that kids like my son, who have been online since they were still in diapers, and who have learned how to stay out of trouble online, much like we were brought up to stay out of trouble offline, can no longer enjoy their computer camp and have to give up the learning that they are yearning for.

Sure there are bad people online, and while I am not sure how the online percentage of bad people compares to bad people in the real world, I suspect that the number is actually lower. But it does not matter, even if it is higher we cannot rob our children of the education that will make them competitive to meet the needs of a few Luddites. We have to develop methods to teach them how to stay out of trouble online the same way we thought generations of people to stay out of trouble offline.

[Tags: YouTube BBC online access education predators]

May 3, 2007

Wikify your org chart and see what happens

In the latest issue of Forbes, which is jam packed with articles on the power of networks, some better than others, they are also announcing their new Corporate Org Chart Wiki - a collaborative application that enables people to document the internal networks of any corporation.

While there is currently not much up there - the thought of having ordinary people, including company insiders and outsiders, collaborate on the creation of the real networks inside companies is a fascinating experiment. Of course, that only works if employees are not afraid to speak up - which seems to be a persistent problem in most companies.

[Tags: influence networks org chart]

March 20, 2007

Is the end of the hierarchical organization in sight?

The latest issue of FAST company has an interesting article on how the traditional business organization is meeting democracy and how that could radically transform the way we think of enterprises in the future.

It's not a new notion - the idea of the "externalized" project-based organization and talk about the impact of the disappearance of friction in communication, cooperation and collaboration on traditional corporate business models and the power that goes with it have been around for a long time. It has become an agreed upon fact that in this interconnected world, size and scale of an organization no longer ensure viability. The notion that only large companies have enough resources to market their products to mass markets of consumers, and to fund serious scientific research, has been shattered for a long time. According to the article, recent scientific breakthroughs in the area of nanotechnology may now break one of last remaining reasons for large companies to exist - namely that they are the only ones having enough capital to build and run manufacturing plants. Heck, even Caterpillar now thinks of itself as an "intellectual property company!"

So are we moving towards a world of a billion single-person enterprises? Probably not soon enough...

[Tags: future of work organization 2.0]

January 22, 2007

The community-driven marketing department - a romantic notion or a possible reality?

In a couple of different discussions (on this blog as well as on the Future of Communities blog) I was taken to task over the suggestion that a company could eliminate their marketing department and replace it with customer communities much like what happened at Ducati.

Over at the Future of Communities blog I looked at what it would take to replace a traditional marketing department with a more lightweight community-based group - concluding that while you may not want to get rid of your marketing department, you should definitely look into making it much more community-driven.

[Tags: communities community management marketing community marketing]

December 6, 2006

No meetings, no office, no rewards for face time - just get the job done

That is the new way of working at Best Buy, which was written up in both Business Week and the New York Times.

Imagine this - not getting rewarded for face-time in the office but instead for getting projects done, all meetings are optional, work from the beach, work while hunting, work from the road, you chose - as long as your projects get done!

This new work environment at Best Buy is called Results-Only Work Environment, or ROWE. By next March, 75% of all Best Buy corporate employees will be on the program. A modified version of the program is also under development for people who work in stores - although it is a little harder to imagine how face time will be eliminated in those customer-facing positions.

Sure, there are a lot of companies that have gone virtual over the years, including pioneer HP, IBM and Sun Microsystems. But no company of this scale has ever taken it to this level - allowing for a great deal of employee self-organization.

Interestingly enough the program did not come from the top down but instead began as a covert guerrilla action that spread quickly and eventually became a revolution within the company. The top brass at Best Buy really needs to be commended for embracing this change instead of killing it. These practices have been tried in many start-ups, only to be killed when VC's bring in the "professional" or "seasoned" "senior" managers.

Come to think of it, many innovative things get killed or never see the daylight when those "guys" move in...

[Tags: virtual office face time future of work self organization]

November 27, 2006

Would you poison a whole community just to catch a few freeloaders?

Communities are hot - with every other company rushing to deploy them to enhance their innovation processes, their new product introduction success ratios or their customer satisfaction ratings. Yet at the same time most companies seem to be very busy destroying what is perhaps their most important community - their employee community. And they are doing it by affecting one of the fundamental forces that drive communities - trust.

Indeed, according to the American Management Association (free but requires registration - via "It's time to start trusting the workforce" article by Jeffrey Pfeffer in Business 2.0 - not yet online), 76% of companies monitor employee web site connections and 55% retain and review email messages. The number of companies tracking telephone calls, including amount of time spent on the phone and phone numbers called has grown to 51%, up from 9% in 2001. And this does not include companies who require periodic medical checks and random drug usage tests.

So while the balance of power between consumers and companies has shifted towards the consumer in the last few decades, the balance of power between employees and companies has clearly shifted towards the employer. We have to give up our right to privacy in return for a paycheck. And what good does that do? Employees at companies like that feel disenfranchised, lack motivation, distrust their company and management, badmouth the company, etc... Not exactly the motivations that can lead to great results.

The good news is that employees can bail - and with a strong economy, hopefully many at those "big brother" shops will do just that. According to the Business 2.0 article, signs of this happening are already here, with the number of executives, salespeople and production personnel exiting their companies more than doubling since 2003, and with the number of technical and professional people who leave going up 70% in that same time period! Maybe someone will start realizing that the cost of labor in high employee turnover environments goes through the roof. Just ask Walmart - where recent research on their low wages vs. employee turnover compared to Costco's makes for a well documented case study on the impact of employee turnover ratio vs. the real cost of labor.

It all comes down to "return on information." If employees do not see personal benefits in return for the personal freedoms they give up - they will bail. With employees being perhaps the most valuable asset a company can have, it is amazing how many of them squander it in the name of "control."

[Tags: employee communities employee relations work environment trust]

November 14, 2006

Dare I say something?

big yawnsm.jpg Are you afraid of speaking up at work? That is the topic of ongoing research reported in the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge. Quoting from their research paper (abstract here) Amy Edmondson from Harvard Business School and James Detert from Penn State, the two researchers, made some interesting observations in this email interview.

While there are individual and contextual reasons why some people speak up more readily than others, the main reason why people do not speak up is "fear" - something that we inherited from our earliest ancestors. As the researchers point out: " it seems we're all hard-wired to overestimate rather than underestimate certain types of risk—it was better (for survival) to "flee" too often from threats that weren't really there than to not flee the one time there was a significant risk. So, we've inherited emotional and cognitive mechanisms that motivate us to avoid perceived risks to our psychological and material well-being...Thus, fear of offending those above us is both natural and widespread."

The interview talks about some ways to change a company culture so that people speak up more frequently. The reality is that changing a culture of hard-wired fear is very difficult. Add to that the fact that change hurts and it may be impossible to really change a company culture without also changing the fundamental hierarchical nature of companies.

[Tags: fear company culture hr change]

October 10, 2006

CEO's with big egos are always bad news

CEO's are supposed to be like conductors, impresarios, major league sport team coaches, or movie directors - you pick the analogy that works best for you. The bottom line is that they need to coordinate disparate and sometimes dysfunctional groups of people - including stars (who frequently have good-size egos all by themselves), connectors, and losers - into doing great things! And they cannot limit themselves to internal resources only. The good ones will do it with externalized communities of people that include employees, customers, suppliers, partners, and resellers. And the best ones will even integrate competitors into their cast of characters that they can influence to achieve their goals.

So what happens when a CEO has a big ego? The answer is simple - a CEO with a big ego cannot play that role!

CEO's with big egos will inevitably clash and compete with other egos in their ecosystem - be they stars in research, marketing, engineering, or other successful CEO's in their industry or region. Those people are their true competition. Big egos do not collaborate - they compete on the ego level. So what comes first in the case of a CEO with a big ego is not the company, the employees or the customers - it is their ego. What is important is how they will look in the eyes of constituents that they deem influential or important when it's all said and done?

At the extreme, the only way for CEO's with big egos to achieve their goals - come out ahead of other stars, or worse, eliminate the other stars while coming out ahead - is by weaving webs of deceit, building a protective cocoon around themselves, and by ensuring that there is a podium/pedestal for them to step on. They surround themselves and protect people who will foster their agenda blindly - in the process creating executive echo chambers and increasingly removing themselves from business realities.

Even though some are really good at hiding their true nature, there are so many tell-tale signs that can point to bad behavior and real bad news in the future. When a new CEO of a well known brand tries to inject himself in the brand by appearing in TV commercials - what do you really think the motivation is? Help change the appeal of the brand in the youth market? A subservient chicken or an office chimp seem to achieve that goal much better... And you know you're in trouble when your CEO tries to limit access to certain people - like the board. Or when she starts bad-mouthing other CEO's who happened to be ex-colleagues and who are now very successful and get a lot of credit for their achievements. And we can go on and on with early warning signs of leaders who can do more damage than good to their organization.

There are a lot of examples of companies with CEO's with big egos that ended up in disasters, and many others where ego-less CEO's are achieving beyond-great results. And as always, there are the exceptions - but we can not all aspire to be like Steve Jobs. But besides these extremes, and because of ego-centric leaders, there are too many companies who never achieve their true potential and too many reputations that get tarnished in the process for no good reason.

[Tags: leadership organizational structure ceo hr hr management]

October 4, 2006

There is no room for two in a box....

Jim Lavoie and his partner Joe Marino from Rite Solutions presented at the Business Innovation Factory's second annual meeting today (which is being live blogged on the Corante Innovation Hub)and talked about how they were able to create a corporate environment which is totally project-based and where leadership "authority" is based on employees' "sphere of influence" at any point in time during a given project rather than on the results of more traditional "pyramid" based games.

To make new employees comfortable with the fact that pyramid-based schemes of career advancement are not the way to go and to constantly remind existing employees of that fact, both periodically put on skids to make fun of the more traditional antics of command and control/hierarchical organizations.

They performed one of their songs at the event and keep a web site - called tombtunes - with all their current executive musical productions. The first song is supposed to go up tomorrow - it's a an absolute "must hear" for everyone with experiences in corporate life, especially for those who might have become "unemployable" because they got disgusted with the way those corporate games work. If you are a "company-man," you will not enjoy it!

Note that both those guys acknowledged being really good at playing the pyramid game :)

[Tags: business models organizational structure hierarchy hr bif business innovation factory]

September 28, 2006

Thriving on the edge of chaos

ants small.jpg Fortune's most recent issue has a number of articles on the increasing chaos in markets, technologies customer behavior, and products. Business models that sustained companies for decades no longer work. Companies can now enter and leave markets at a moment's notice. Market disruptions happen faster and faster.

According to the article, the way to manage chaos is not by retraining managers, it's by changing people's mindset and assumptions about business, management, and most economic principles we grew up with. Successful companies are meeting the challenges of a chaotic environment with chaos - by loosening controls, getting rid of hierarchies & titles, providing full transparency into all aspects of the business and more.

What causes all this change? For starters, the fact that companies can now operate free of physical assets makes them both more flexible and vulnerable at the same time. Next is the fact that with the advent of the Internet we have witnessed a dramatic power-shift towards the consumer. Information about products and services, which used to be controlled by the seller - giving them an unfair advantage - is not only widely available, it is complemented with free flowing consumer generated content that gives the consumer the upper hand in the power play.

And the chaos is here to stay. As the article points out "the forecast for most companies is continued chaos with a chance of disaster."

The only way to survive is to allow your company to operate at the edge of chaos - something that nature knows all to well how to do. Perhaps the best training for company executives and employees will not come from business schools but from science departments who are studying complexity theory and how self-organized systems can thrive in nature -even in the worst of circumstances.

If you are starting a new company it may be easy for you to inject that right kind of culture in your company's DNA. For existing companies the only answer is change, dramatic change that is - and as scientists have found, change hurts, and people naturally resist it.

So should we get ready to see many corporate icons dissapear in the near future?

[Tags: business models chaos complexity theory edge of chaos]

September 22, 2006

Crowdsourcing vs. community outsourcing

Crowdsourcing has been a popular term ever since it appeared in a Wired Magazine article earlier this summer. This past week, Business Week jumped on the crowdsourcing bandwagon with an article in their second issue of Inside Innovation (may require subscription - but you can find a good description of the article by Renee Hopkins Callahan over at IdeaFlow).

What is confusing about the "crowdsourcing" terminology in both articles is that they use "crowd" to refer to the "wisdom of crowds" - a term introduced a few years back by James Surowiecki to describe the fairly simple idea that large groups of people are smarter than an elite few. Many of the crowdsourcing examples used in both articles, however, like the use of iStockphoto to source images cheaply, do not rely on wisdom of crowds at all. Getting your images from iStockphoto instead of from a professional photographer is like outsourcing your photography to the public - where everyone can be a semi-pro with high end cameras below $1,000 these days. In the end you still buy your images from individual photographers. There may be a crowd, but there is no wisdom of crowds involved here.

When a company like John Fluevog Boots & Shoes asks its fans to submit and vote on new shoe designs - that is a model based on the wisdom of crowds. The wisdom of the mass is more likely to identify a winner than a select few (see also related post on when wisdom of crowds does not work).

The Business Week article spells out four rules for successful crowdsourcing - or should it be to outsource your task/process to an outside community.

First, be focused and provide clear guidelines to what you want to have done. Not really all that different from any outsourced project. If you give vague guidelines you will likely get something back that you did not expect.

Second - get your filters right. Since by outsourcing a task to a large set of people you will get a large number of ideas, you need to filter all those ideas so that you can find the gems. But why not use the wisdom of the crowd to do the filtering? IBM solicits ideas from customers and employees during two day innovation jams - which led to 37,000 ideas the last time around. They then use their own employee "crowd" to filter those ideas. As most companies do not have 140,000 employees to draw upon, they could use their fans and customers to select the best ideas. An idea could be emailed to a randomly selected set of active people for voting, rating or ranking.

The third is to tap the right crowd. Pretty obvious when you think about it. Just like you would not outsource a complex engineering problem to a company of 14 year old summer students, you need to be picky about the community you outsource your task to.

Lastly is to build your community into social networks. While this may be key to success in getting certain communities to function in the long run, enabling networks or teams to form within your community goes against the principle of the wisdom of crowds - adding to the terminology confusion.

Renee adds two more rules in her post - find ways to feed the ideas into your company's existing processes and fund the process - as incentives fuel creativity.

In the end, successfully outsourcing product innovation and other processes to outside communities comes down to a deep understanding of two factors:

understanding of the traditional keys to success for that particular process
understanding of the fundamentals to successfully create (if needed), manage and interact with communities - virtual or otherwise

[Tags: crowdsourcing community community management outsourcing]

August 28, 2006

CMO tenure keeps going down...

According to Spencer Stuart (via Brand Republic), the average CMO tenure keeps going down. A painful side effect is that marketing agencies have to defend their business sooner as well.

The changes are not that dramatic - with the new average tenure for CMO's being 23.2 months in 2006, down from 23.5 months in 2005 and 23.6 months in 2004.

The whole shortening in tenure is likely due to a combination of things: the fundamentals of marketing going through a dramatic shift - leaving many CMO's who are not permanent students of the industry in the dust - and the accountability of the CMO on the executive team being miss-aligned with what their real role should be.

[Tags: cmo tenure marketing accountability CMO marketing+changes ]

July 12, 2006

Can you actually get marketing and sales to stop fighting?

According to a recent article in the Harvard Business Review (requires subscription or can be purchased), you could and you should strive towards integrated sales and marketing departments as the benefits of having both groups work in harmony are plentiful.

Stop marketing departments who spend on advertising without tying the results to sales, stop sales departments that only fulfill demand instead of (co)creating it, and stop managers for whom marketing is nothing more than selling and sales support... p.l.e.a.s.e!

The authors see two main sources of friction between sales and marketing - one economic and one cultural. The economic one has to do with the power distribution between sales and marketing in three of the four P's - promotion, pricing, and product. The cultural one, which may be even more entrenched, has to do with the fact that the two departments attract vastly different types of people - with different educational backgrounds, skill sets, etc.

The article offers a few suggestions to better align the marketing and sales departments:

Encourage disciplined communication - and that does not mean more communication, which is expensive.
Create joint assignments and rotate jobs

Improve sales force feedback

Once you have your sales and marketing departments aligned you can go a step further and work towards achieving an integrated relationship. The authors suggest the following actions to achieve integrated departments:

Appoint a chief revenue or chief customer officer - a CRO or a CCO
Define the steps in the marketing and sales funnels
Split marketing into two groups - strategic and tactical groups
Set shared revenue targets and reward systems
Integrate sales and marketing metrics

While some of the advise and terminology may seem a little staid or even passé (after all, is marketing still about the 4 P's? and is the buying process still a funnel?), the advise is solid and practical and should benefit any company with dysfunctional marketing and sales departments.

[Tags: sales marketing hr organizational behavior]

July 5, 2006

Which organizational structure has the highest chance of survival in a pandemic?

In a recent Harvard Business Review forethought (here - requires subscription or can be purchased separately), Prof. Nitin Nohria from the Harvard Business School asks which of the following organizational structures would have a higher likelihood of surviving a pandemic or other disaster:

organization 1:

hierarchical
centralized leadership
tightly coupled
concentrated workforce
specialists
policy and procedure driven

organization 2::

networked
distributed leadership
loosely coupled
dispersed workforce
cross-trained generalists
guided by simple yet flexible rules

Which company would you bet your money on?

It does not require an advanced degree to realize that there are some fundamental lessons to be learned from mother nature...

[Tags: crisis management self organization pandemic]

June 14, 2006

Is the need for higher customer transparency really new?

Many people talk about the increased need for customer and employee transparency, or about the fact that people do not trust what companies have to say "anymore." But are those really new? Or are they being hyped up by consultants who are trying to create the next hype-wave to ride on?

if you look at the most recent brain research, it would show that this trait has been with us forever. If the brain is hardwired to detect "errors," and when it finds them it turns our brain into a 2 year old child's brain who will resist anything coming from that source - then we should have been rejecting and mistrusting all "marketing hype" ever since it existed. People have always expected "error-free" (=true) messages! There is nothing new here, we are hardwired for it.

Maybe what happens is that with the exponential increase of phony sounding marketing messages, more people have started focusing on associating them with BS and have developed new subconscious neural pathways or mental maps to discard them all. Or maybe the messages have just become more phony and exaggerated in companies' quests to differentiate themselves within an increasingly cluttered marketplace.

And maybe the fact that some studies show that an increasing number of people distrust companies can be explained by the fact that it has become more socially acceptable and definitely more doable for consumers to fight back and publicly expose the "marketing untruths," - thus changing the collective (un)consciousness which associates corporate messages with mistrust or untruth. Or maybe it is just a cyclical anomaly, and two years from now we will be back up.

Another important consequence of all this is in the area of word of mouth recommendations and consumer generated content. As more and more companies start to "manage" that channel, often times without full disclosure, more and more "errors" will seep into the word of mouth recommendations - over time causing the effectiveness and trustworthiness of word of mouth to erode as well.

One thing is for sure - the customer has more ways to retaliate against a company than ever before - making the "customer is increasingly in charge" statement a true statement.

[Tags: neuroscience cgm change management hr wom word of mouth trust]

June 13, 2006

Neuroscientists find: Change Hurts

A fascinating article in the most recent issue of Strategy + Business from Booz Allen & Hamilton, The Neuroscience of Leadership, describes how change hurts, how the carrot and stick approach to management does not work, and how people who focus on different things have physiological differences that prevent them from seeing the world the same way.

It's no secret that people resist change - even when their life depends on it! New advances in neuroscience found that the brain relegates routine tasks to a part of the brain that requires little energy - freeing up the more conscious part of the brain, and also the more energy-intensive part, to process new things. So say you have been driving a car for awhile, you will probably do it "without thinking," but if you get into a country where they drive on the other side of the road, that same activity will now become a very intensive and tiring experience. The same is true with organizational change. After a while people will sell ideas, go to meetings, and manage others unconsciously - and trying to change their routine will be tiring and uncomfortable.

But that is not all - there is another force at work in the brain that resists change. The brain is very much wired to detect "errors" in its environment - perceived differences between expectations and actuality. When an error is detected, it triggers the fear circuitry in our brain, which is one of the most primitive parts of our brain, and which basically hijacks our thinking. We become emotional and start acting impulsively - our animal instincts take over.

So try changing someones behavior and their brain will start sending powerful messages that something is wrong, thus decreasing their capacity for higher thought. Change results in discomfort and stress...

Another interesting finding of the study is that by focusing attention on something - a particular problem or process -, a person will develop new neural connections which if reinforced enough will become part of their subconscious. This has some interesting consequences. The first one is that if a person starts focusing on a "problem", he or she will start developing new connections (also known as reasons) for why the problem occurs. While they may be true, they will do little in support of change. That also means that the "carrot and stick" approach to changing people's behavior is flawed, as it focuses the person's attention to the problems that are causing the behavior that we want changed instead of the solutions.

Another consequence of this finding is that people who tend to specialize in certain fields - marketing, sales, finance, etc. - tend to develop brain connections to handle their job with the least amount of energy possible. That means that a long term finance person and an old engineering hacker have their brains wired differently - and they will never see the world the same way, even if the rest of their worldview were the same!

So what are we to do if we want to foster change? The study also found that if the brain has a "moment of insight" coming from within (coming to a solution/conclusion by yourself), that moment is associated with a sudden adrenaline-like burst of high energy that is conducive to creating new links (change) in the brain. So if you want to instill change, you have to focus people on solutions instead of problems, let them come to their own answers, and keep them focused on their insights. That simple!

Oh - and the next time you get in a argument with the finance guy - remember, his brain is wired differently than yours!!

[Tags: neuroscience change change management hr leadership]

May 25, 2006

Let employees search the web for personal reasons!

A new CNN study finds that people would rather give up their morning coffee than the ability to surf the web at work (via Gartner's high performance workplace)

Letting people do personal stuff at work most likely increases their productivity! Sure, the study says that they spend a little over 3 hours on personal stuff - but whoever still measures productivity in terms of hours is solidly grounded in the Industrial revolution age and doomed for extinction...

[Tags: workplace organizational behavior work]

May 11, 2006

Who needs a CMO anyway?

problems sm.jpg Marketing communications guru Larry Weber may have been one of the first to publicly question the need for a C-level executive in marketing when during his keynote address at the Syndicate Conference last year he said: "Whenever a business category gets messed up, we get a C title. Now marketing is so messed up, we've got CMOs."

Triggered by the recent Spencer Stuart survey, Marc Babej and Tim Pollack (disclosure: both acquaintances/friends and contributors to the Corante Marketing Hub ) tackled the question in dept in their most recent "Unsolicited Advice" column which gets published weekly on Forbes.com.

In their analysis they conclude that the reason that an average CMO's tenure is shorter than that of a CEO's is because their job is ill-defined, and they proceed by making a recommendation for what a CMO's job description should be - "responsible not only for marketing communications but also (sorry to be stepping on toes) for product development and sales."

More specifically, they believe that a CMO's responsibilities should include: ensuring the company's products and services are in tune with customer demand, directing new product development and ensuring the continuing appeal of existing offerings, marketing communications, achieving top-line growth objectives, and meeting corporate margin goals.

While they bring up some great points, some of them deserve some further discussion. First off, let's start with an area of responsibility that was omitted from the list but that arguably should be part of a CMO's responsibilities. A CMO should be responsible for all customer "touch points," and that should include customer service. You can work for years to build an awesome brand, only to squander it after a few months of poor customer service (and following that with poor communications makes the demise event faster - as witnessed by Dell, Kryptonite, Mercedes, etc.). The CMO needs to be held accountable, and have the responsibility, to ensure that the customer experience is consistent across all customer touch points.

This next point may just be a semantic difference, but from a company's products and services point of view, the focus should not be on meeting customer demand but on meeting customer needs - both explicit needs as well as latent needs. Finding the latter and building successful offerings to meet those is an especially tricky proposition, but one which if done properly, often results in disruptive, breakthrough, and market-creating product innovations. Customers will not tell you, nor could they, how you should build such products. You "invent" them first and then find ways turn the latent market needs into active active needs.

Having a CMO responsible for product development instead of product definition and product marketing may not be such a good idea either. The product definition process is a process that should be driven by the CMO's product management team in partnership with the technical/product development team. But once a product is defined, including cost targets and time-to-market targets, the product development process itself should be run by a dedicated and independent product development executive, not the CMO. In fact, having the CMO in charge of product development may result in more "me-too" products, not more competitively differentiated products. Another unintended consequence of having the CMO run the development show, especially true in high tech and if the CMO is also in charge of sales, may be an abundance of one-off product versions/special editions built specifically to satisfy end-of quarter requirements. Such situations eventually lead to costing a company millions of dollars in wasted upgrade and migration resources, not to speak about the fact that it can also severely limit a company's ability to innovate in the future.

While CMOs should be held accountable for achieving top-line growth objectives and corporate margin goals, hopefully that is an accountability that they share with the rest of the executive team.

[Tags: CMO cmo responsibilities cmo job HR]

May 10, 2006

How to avoid burnout...

Laura Ricci - a fellow LinkedIn Blogger - has a great article on what causes burnout and how to avoid it.

It basically comes down to doing the same thing that will ensure ongoing creativity, imagination and ultimately innovation - make sure you take breaks, and make sure you talk to others about things that are not related to what you're currently working on!

[Tags: burnout creativity]

May 9, 2006

CMOs get a lot of lip service in the executive suite

According to Advertising Age, a survey released by Spencer Stuart yesterday finds that CEOs are falling short in working with marketing.

While 85% of the 278 executives who were surveyed said that it was either "extremely critical" or "very critical" for CEOs to communicate with marketing, only slightly more than half found that happening in practice. In fact, only 18% said that CEOs were excellent at at that! The survey also found that CEOs are not very good at holding other executives accountable for ensuring that they partner with marketing.

Often times, it is the CMO who sets the direction for the company, and when that happens with little support from the CEO or the rest of the executive team, you get what's happening at many companies...they look rather rudderless.

[Tags: CMO spencer struart cmo survey HR]

April 10, 2006

Founder CEO's drive higher returns than "professional" managers

Fortune Magazine's latest issue has an article on how Fortune 500 companies that are still run by the founders are tearing up the market.

While the Fortune 500 sample is small, there is other evidence based on research of an Ohio State University finance professor named Radiger Fahlenbrach that companies run by founder-CEOs outperform the broader stock market by 8 %. One of the reasons being put forth for this finding is that founders care more. The study further uncovered other interesting facts - namely that "founder-run companies have bigger capital budgets and invest considerably more in research and development than nonfounder-run firms."

Unfortunately, this is not a widely held belief amongst typical startup backers, who are too often rushing towards pushing founders to the side and replacing them with "professional management"- types to "babysit" their investment. There is no question that some founders are not CEO material, but before taking out founders from the executive team line-up, investors and board members should really look at complementing the weaknesses of the founders in other ways.

[Technorati Tags: startups founder VC]

April 3, 2006

Avoid having your workers become dumb and fat

Quoting the National Sleep Foundation, the Boston Sunday Globe yesterday reported that people who do not sleep enough have a chance to become fat and dumb.

"Those who get fewer than six hours of sleep a night might as well be drunk," says the reporter, citing that people who stay up for 18 hours straight function in similar ways to those people with an 0.08 percent blood alcohol level - the state's legal limit. And according to a researcher at the University of Chicago, not getting enough sleep results in the brain starting to think that it needs to store food.

So companies should make sure that their workers are not up all night from work-related stress, as they could end up with a dumb and fat workforce :)

[Technorati Tags: hr sleep disorder]

March 28, 2006

Customer's expectations of sales people does not match vendors' expectations

drunk sales.jpg The latest issue of the Harvard Business Review contains an interesting short article on customer expectations for sales people: "What B2B Customers Really Expect" (requires subscription).

There is a tremendous mismatch between what customers are expecting from their sales people and what vendors think customers expect. Amazingly, there is also a big gap between what vendors think their customers expect from their sales people and what vendors actually recruit for.

The top quality that customers are looking for is salespeople's subject matter and solution expertise - followed by understanding of customer's business and industry, and professionalism. Vendors thought that subject matter and solution expertise would only rank third on customers' priorities - after professionalism and understanding of customer's business and industry. So vendors have their customers' priorities for sales people reversed.

Most interestingly is how vendors actually recruit. The top attribute that vendors recruit for is social and communication skills - a priority that ranked dead last for customers. The second top attribute vendors hire for is organizational and decision-making skills - which ranked just before last on the customers' priority list.

The authors of the article - both partners at Infoteam Sales Process Consulting - recommend that companies hire for industry and subject matter expertise instead of social skills.

It makes no sense for sales people to acquire subject matter and solution expertise, nor understanding of a customer's business and industry on the job.

[Technorati Tags: sales sales recruiting sales people selling]

March 22, 2006

More feedback on hyper-specialization and innovation

Last week's post on hyperspcialization drew quite an interesting discussion, which is being summarized here.

Olivier Blanchard over at the BrandBuilder blog picks up the conversation and adds a lot of interesting examples of how a broader background may help you innovate better then by being overly focused. He also makes the following recommendations "... my advice to you if you're in a rut (or if you're looking for your next big idea) is to just relax and go outside. Take a road trip. Take the afternoon off and go ride a bike. Go into a computer store and find out everything there is to know about inkjet printers. Go pick up a graphic design magazine and hang out at a tea bar. Take a stroll through an antique shop or your town's hippest interior decorator's gallery. Read a book about something you've never read about before. Go have a drink with a friend or a colleague or a competitor" - something I believe Tom Peters recommended over 20 years ago.

Mohamad Mova Al 'Afghani over at NanoTechnology Law argues specifically about law in nanotechnology, and how a well formed legal platform for nanotech will have to be much broader than just one based on IP law. He also quotes Peter Drucker as saying "This is particularly important as innovation in any one knowledge area tends to originate outside the area itself..... The new approaches to the study of history have, for instance, come out of economics, psychology and archeology all disciplines that historians never considered relevant to their field and to which they had rarely before been exposed....... By itself, specialized knowledge yields no performance."

Chuck Frey over at Innovation Tools wrote about this in the past and agrees that we need generalists to connect the dots.

Gautham Gosh over at Gautham Gosh on Management also wrote about this in the past, in one posts pointing to Dave Pollard from How to Save the World as saying that: "We live in an age of specialization, where we are encouraged to narrow our interests and our activities, to focus and limit ourselves to doing things at which we are very competent. So parts of our brain get a lot of exercise and other parts very little. What's worse, this can actually narrow our comfort zone, the range of things we enjoy doing or thinking about and are competent in."

Steve Hardy over at Creative Generalist argues that ideas come from the confluence of multiple disciplines but that innovations are always the result of specialists.

In the comment section of the original post it was also suggested that perhaps hyper-specialization might have a negative effect on ethics.

Here are some other links on the topic if interested:

- The Business Innovation Insider
- Mises Economics Blog

[Technorati Tags: management innovation human resources]

March 13, 2006

Being descriptive works better than being prescriptive

ants small.jpg Have you ever noticed how most people are prescriptive when they ask you to do something? Whether it'd be a colleague or a boss at work, or a friend, or a parent - not enough people ask for help in a descriptive way - they rather give you the exact steps they want you to follow in order to achieve their intended goal.

It is so deeply ingrained in our society, even most religions are like that - at least the three major Mesopotamian ones: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They are full of "do this" and "don't do this". This is in stark contrast with some other religions - like for example Zoroastrianism, which only says "think well, speak well and act well" - and leaves the interpretation for how to do that to the individual. It's a bit like saying "do to others what you would like them to do to you" - which would result in very different outcomes for different people and cultures.

Many aspects of government are like that too - take as an example the "sentencing guidelines" for judges in the US.

And most old-fashioned marketers act like that as well - trying to "control" how people should interpret what happens around them.

In a way, being prescriptive in an insult to human intelligence - or to any intelligence, really. It assumes that the people who are being given the directions would never be able to get there by themselves. In a lot of ways it assumes that most humans are on a inevitable and permanent path of self-destruction. It is interesting that we developed such behavior in the first place - when none of the natural processes surrounding us, including some which led us to where we are, have prescriptive behavior built in.

Perhaps more importantly, such behavior stands in the way of innovation and somewhat consistent behavior in crowds, companies, religions, and citizenry.

The next time you ask someone for help - try describing what end goals you have in mind and let that person come up with a path for how to get there. Try it when asking a child to do something. Try it by by being honest in your communications with customers and employees. Then see what happens...

[Technorati Tags: marketing self-organization HR communications]

March 8, 2006

Do you hire for talent/IQ or for business savvy/EQ?

This is always a difficult decision - and for startups one that can make or break a company. Do you hire bright talent - regardless of experience or emotional intelligence? Or do you hire people who have been there, done that and who have developed ways to navigate the complexities of humans-at-work?

We know that competent jerks do not achieve much - which can be one drawback of hiring for IQ regardless of experience or EQ. On the experienced-based recruiting front you have potential issues as well. For some people, too much experience can lead to a well-defined box in which they tend to operate - never to leave the boundaries of their comfort zone. For others, more experience somehow results in less and less boundaries - their comfort zone includes the unknown, and they like to venture there.

It is particularly interesting to watch what happens when two giants in the same industry start showing very different hiring practices. The jury is still out, and this may be too much based on anecdotal evidence, but watch the difference between who Google is hiring and who Yahoo is recruiting. Google seems to be going for raw intelligence - only the brightest math and science PHD's and cute puzzles to even get your resume into their hands. Yahoo on the other hand seems to be aiming for people with broad backgrounds, and proven track records in innovative corporate environments.

It will be interesting to see the differences in emerging cultures and in market success for both those companies in the long run.

[Technorati Tags: management talent human resources hiring practices]

March 7, 2006

hyper-specialization is not always the right thing to do

aura sm.jpg People and companies tend to hyper-specialize - getting to know more and more about less and less. While this Cartesian-based view of the world may have had it's benefits in the past, it is full of dangers as we move forward.

First off, hyper-specialization may very well stand in the way of breakthrough innovation. Indeed, most breakthrough innovations happen not at one level of specialization - but they increasingly happen at the confluence of multiple disciplines. People who have the capacity to scan across multiple businesses or vast amounts of information, and who can translate innovations from one field to the next are as likely, if not more, to come up with breakthrough innovations as the specialists.

Which brings up another important negative side effect of hyper-specialization. Hyper specialists know very much about very little - which means that they do not understand what happens in adjacent spaces. What should be valuable information coming from other sources within the company or markets now looks like data - with no meaning, nor the ability to influence the hyper-specialists' work. Worse, in hyper-specialized environments, you could conceive that the hyper-specialists will not understand the impact of their actions on the broader picture - which can have especially dire consequences when it comes down to environmental impact of innovation.

Even at a more fundamental level, hyper-specialization can have severe drawbacks for companies. For example, saying that you can never bring an inside sales rep outside because he or she needs a totally different skill set to succeed outside may lead to overall company moral issues that far outweigh the benefits of honing someone's skill sets in one area of expertise only.

[Technorati Tags: management innovation human resources]

February 7, 2006

Dee Hock's four priorities for managers

Talking about the power of self-organization in companies, Dee Hock, himself a pioneer in building perhaps the largest self-organizing commercial entity in the world - VISA - has some recommendations in his book Birth of the Chaordic Age on the single most important responsibilities of any manager.

"The first and paramount responsibility is to manage self; one's own integrity, character, ethics, knowledge, wisdom, temperament, words and acts." Not easy to do, and rarely focused on by managers - it is something that he believes we should spend half of our time on.
The second most important responsibility "is to manage those who have the authority over us: bosses, supervisors, directors, regulators, etc." " Without their consent and support, you cannot follow you convictions, exercise judgements, use creative ability, achieve constructive results, or create an environment in which others can do the same." He thinks that we should be spending a quarter of our time in managing superiors.
The third highest priority "is to manage peers - people who have no authority over us and over whom we have no authority." Customers, suppliers, associates, competitors, and our whole environment fall into this category. "Without their support, respect and confidence - nothing can be accomplished!" He thinks we should be spending one fifth of our time on that. Of course, you cannot "manage" those folks - but you can influence them, convince them, motivate them, etc.
After spending all that time on managing self, superiors, and peers, that does not leave much time to manage those we have authority over. "Exactly! One need only select decent people, introduce them to the concept, induce them to practice it, and enjoy the process. If those over whom we have authority properly manage themselves, manage us, manage their peers, and replicate the process with those they employ, what is there to do but see they are properly recognized, rewarded, and stay out of their way?"

This sounds so "right" - so why is it that there are not more people managing this way?

Dee Hock closes this section with another interesting quote - one that many companies, especially start-ups, have tried to live by; but few have been able to sustain - "It is not making better people of others that management is about. It's about making a better person of self. Income, power, and titles have nothing to do with that."

[Technorati Tags: management self organization]

January 19, 2006

Ten Trends to watch in 2006 according to McKinsey

McKinsey Quarterly's Ian Davis and Elizabeth Stephenson just released a web exclusive trend article with macroeconomic factors, environmental and social issues, and business and industry developments that will shape the corporate landscape in the coming years (may require subscription).

Apparently success is not always about execution - but more about being in the right markets and geographies with the right technology. So it's more about being in the flow rather of going upstream. The key of course is to find the right currents. And, according to the authors, to predict the right currents you need to look far out into the future instead of focusing on short term changes.

The three macroeconomic trends are:

Centers of economic activity will shift profoundly, not just globally, but also regionally.
With a rapidly aging population in the West, public-sector activities will balloon, making productivity gains essential.
The consumer landscape will change and expand significantly - with 1B new consumers entering the marketplace

They also list 4 Social and environmental trends:

Technological connectivity will transform the way people live and interact - some of that is already visible
The battlefield for talent will shift - with a big shift towards knowledge-intensive industries
The role and behavior of big business will come under increasingly sharp scrutiny - about time
Demand for natural resources will grow, as will the strain on the environment - think about this (heard on NPR this weekend) 1/3 of the world copper inventory is in the ground, 1/3 in use and 1/3 in landfills

And then they list 3 business and industry trends:

New global industry structures are emerging
Management will go from art to science
Ubiquitous access to information is changing the economics of knowledge

Perhaps the most significant trend is the one related to shortages in natural resources and the increasing strain on the environment. Sure people will behave differently because of technology and come up with new management structures, and the worker profile will change. And while it will be fun to be an active participant in these changes, in the grand scheme of things, those changes will be incremental.

When it comes down to the environment, however, incremental changes will not be enough to result in a sustainable world for the future. What we need is the end of a "human-centric-we-are-the-end-of-evolution-and-everything-in-this-world-is-ours" attitude in exchange for a more symbiotic "world-nature-human-technology" balanced worldview. And that will not happen incrementally - it will require radical new ways of world governance and fundamental changes in people's beliefs about their place and role in nature's evolution.

[Technorati Tags: trends globalization environment]

January 10, 2006

The future of the global workspace

McKinsey Quarterly has a interesting interview with Jeffrey Joerres, the CEO of Manpower on the future of the global workforce (requires subscription).

With $15B in revenue and employing some 2M workers worldwide (72 countries), ManPower has an interesting perspective on a global workforce dominated by older and more expensive workers in Europe and North America, and rapid growth making it difficult to attract and retain enough qualified workers in China, India and much of the developing world.

Here are some of the more interesting highlights from the interview:

In their top 10 global clients - 10-25% of the workers are "nonregular", flexible staff (US average according to US Bureau of Labor Statistics is 3%)
The main reason for having nonregular workers is not cost saving, but an inability for companies to move fast enough by themselves
The lifecycle of "hot jobs" has shortened dramatically - making the need for continuous retraining immensely important
Most companies are still doing a poor job at retraining workers
Older workers are more interested in part-time jobs than full-time temporary jobs (project based work) - which is a challenge as most companies need the latter
He interchanges "employee engagement" with "employer branding" - which sounds so...industrial revolution-like...(my comment in italic)

Jeff Joerres further states that temporary work has increasingly become a strategic concern - and that companies can no longer afford to only pay attention to the top 10% of their organization. They need instead to focus on overall workforce optimization.

Of course, and after the 2001 downturn, companies and investors have grown accustomed to what he calls "leaned out" organizations, where companies stretched the limits of their workers and saw that they could do more with less. He thinks that companies will never go back to the old ways and just expect more from their workers.

But is this truly a sustainable situation? Or will there be a backlash at some point? Or will new forms of organizations emerge in the future?

Don't you think that organizational innovation could lead to new breakthrough's that would eclipse what is possible with a "more of the same company-branding workforce-optimization" type of strategy? I sure hope so.

[Technorati Tags: workforce labor organizational structure future of work]

January 4, 2006

Building emergent business models

As I am working through my (huge) pile of books to read I hit another good one last night. It is "The birth of the Chaordic Age" by Dee Hock. Not exactly a new one, but I never claimed this site to be a news site or a recent book review site...

As many of you know, Dee Hock was the founder of VISA - one of the largest companies in the world. The interesting part about VISA is that it is one of the few large-scale commercial entities where the organizational infrastructure is not based on a command and control hierarchy, but rather on a true emergent self-organizing infrastructure. When Hock realized that none of the traditional company models could handle such a massively complex and distributed business model he focused instead on building a DNA for the new company, based on purpose and principles, rather than building a command and control infrastructure with all of its associated rules and regulations. The results - a huge company that emerged from chaos in less than 2 decades to become one of the most successful self-organizing companies in the world.

It is interesting to see what questions drove him throughout his career and ultimately led to the creation of VISA:

Why are institutions everywhere, whether political, commercial, or social, increasingly unable to manage their affairs?
Why are individuals, everywhere, increasingly in conflict with and alienated from the institutions of which they are part?
Why are society and the biosphere increasingly in disarray?

It's also interesting to read him say that: "...the need to harbor the Four Beasts that inevitably devour their keeper, Ego, Envy, Avarice and Ambition, and of a great bargain, trading Ego for humility, Envy for equanimity, Avarice for time, and Ambition for liberty..."

Maybe that is the way to ensure that marketing is not just another department (or worse - a set of departments) in a company - but rather a way of doing business, a way to behave in the marketplace. Instead of creating organizational structures with hierarchies, goals, rules and regulations we could focus instead on developing marketing DNA that can spread throughout the whole organization and become part of the company's fabric. On a certain level, Ritz was able to do that with their "every employee can spend up to $2,000 to fix any customer problem" principle. That's not a rule which gets enforced, and it's not a goal that gets measured (other than maybe to track potential abuse) - it's really a "behavioral" DNA strand that gets injected throughout the company. We could expand on that and come up with "listening" DNA strands, "innovation" DNA strands, or "branding" DNA strands.

Heck - why stop with marketing? Why not "financial" DNA strands, or a "governance" DNA strands?

[Technorati Tags: organizational structure hr marketing employee behavior]

December 6, 2005

The problems of managing people in teams

In it's latest issue, Fortune Magazine has an article where they review Brooks' 30 year old law:

"Adding people to a late software project makes it later."

And how that law really applies to all industries.

In the interview, and when talking about why the law applies across industries, Frank Brooks goes on to say:

"Brooks' law depends heavily on the amount of information that has to be communicated. So the argument is that if you add people to a project that you already know is late, which means you're at least in the middle of the project, you have to repartition the work. That's a job in itself: Just deciding who is going to do what means that instead of having the thing divided into the units you had it divided into, you have to divide it into more units. Sometimes that can be done by subdividing the existing units, but sometimes you have to move boundaries. That's a lot of work. The next thing is, you have to train the new people. Who can train them? Only the old people. So they quit working and go to training. And the new people are green and have to get up to speed. So there's a period where they're unproductive, and there's a period when they are less productive. And there's a period when they inject errors into the process. Then there are just more people to communicate to."

That is why if you can get some sort of collaborative tool adopted, you should push for it. If the whole project's history is in one place, and accessible by new team members, you will cut down dramatically on getting that person up to speed and also on using other team member's time to make that happen.

[Technorati Tags: project management collaboration teams]

October 13, 2005

Are you ready for the Gen Y workforce?

Fast Company has a funny article about the Generation Y hitting the workforce - and the interesting consequences of over-involved boomer parent.

"Like, say, after Johnny gets a not-so-glowing performance review, Johnny's mom calls his boss: "The best way to motivate Johnny is not through negative feedback!" reprimands Mom"

Are you ready for that? Or is it all a load of hyped up generalizations?

The comments are funny too...universities having to ban parents from campus...or the GenX'er seeing some opportunity "Well maybe these little brat Gen Yers will annoy the old fart Baby Boomers into retiring so us loafing Gen Xers can start moving up the ranks of management"...

[Technorati Tags: gen y generations boomers]

October 6, 2005

HR 2.0 - when will companies get it - employees are not disposable!

Jeffrey Pepper - Professor at Stanford University and columnist for Business 2.0 - has a great article in the current issue of business 2.0 entitled: "The Myth of the Disposable Worker" (here - may require subscription)

He posits that companies that forcefully rank their people to get rid of those near the bottom are doing something akin to running a factory that produces lots of defective widgets and announcing the solution as “(We) have created a high-performance manufacturing system by throwing imperfect items in the trash.” - it's just ridiculous!

I especially love this quote - talking about an incident when the dean at the Stanford Business School complained that he did not give enough low grades -

"When he asked why the grades in the class were, on average, higher than those awarded by my peers, I replied (only partly in jest), “Maybe I’m a better teacher.”"

But that's what it is all about - isn't it? Sure, you will always end up with better and poorer performers (and some real duds) - but you got to remember that as you grow, the profile of your employee pool will start reflecting the profile of the population as a whole around you. And it's what you do with that talent that will set you apart from the competitors. Sure there are star companies that can attract and hire superior talent, but for most companies - thinking that you will outdo the averages is like thinking you will succeed in timing the stock market - it just won't happen that often.

Why cannot most companies unleash the passion that can be found in open source projects, web 2.0 type companies and other environments? Is it because we have organizational structures and procedures that choke all communications up and down the chain and in between organizational silos? Or is it because we measure people on goals that are too granular for them to get excited or passionate (i.e., measuring a marketing person on click-through rates only instead of on their ability to impact the quantity and quality and cost of new customer acquisition)? Or is it because we allow cultures to flourish that cause people to behave differently than they do in the outside world? Or are we just bad teachers?

And don't forget, like Jeffrey says in his article - high turnover is expensive:

"First you have to give out severance pay, and then you have to find and hire replacements, invest in their training, and suffer shortfalls in customer service and productivity until the new people get up to speed. Since you are probably going back to the same labor pool to hire again, odds are you’ll fire a lot of your replacements too. That’s because relative turnover rates tend to stay constant -- low-turnover organizations that know how to hire and develop talent keep doing so effectively, while high-turnover organizations continue to churn through bodies."

Bad business...

[Technorati Tags: human resources hr employee relations]

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