emergencemarketing.com

Doc Searls has an interesting, albeit provocative, article in the Linux Journal, tiled “Markets without Marketing” (via Horse:Pig:Cow, which has a great follow-up post on it, as does Hugh, who also disagrees).

The article has a number of sweeping market observations, predictions and recommendations – many of which are fairly controversial :

• One of the biggest problems with marketing is that it all too often focuses on “capturing and holding customers, rather than “finding and satisfying customer needs”.
• As markets are becoming truly free, we do not have much, if any, need for marketing. Marketing should get out of the way and let engineers talk directly with the customers who will be using the product.
• Advertising is going to die and PR is already dead
• Markets have evolved from conversations to relationships – which will require new skills and will get supported by the new tools
• Marketing needs to get out of the website construction business – it should all get replaced with wikis, blogs, and other direct linkage between information about the products and the customer
• Trade shows can be useful, but please do not send marketing folks
• Nothing is worse that vaporware and yet that is what marketing pushes
• Marketing does not know how you make money with technology or products – but engineering does. And besides, the real question is to understand how you will make money “because” of the technology… not “with” it.

Wow – Doc must have been seriously hit over the head by an old-school marketing spin-meister

It is true that many marketers are clueless and deserve the bad rap that they are getting. But more often than not, that behavior comes from the very top – with CEO’s, CFO’s and other VP’s expecting marketing folks to do unnatural acts, and getting rid of them if they do not deliver the same old stuff.

Of course, marketing needs to get out of the way. It cannot be a bureaucratic wall between the customer and the company. But there is a huge gap between hearing what the customer says, and building successful products. Engineering has to have first line of communications with the customer. But while that may bring many advantages – ranging from a better understanding of customer needs by the people who are actually building the product, to better morale in the engineering team – this by itself will not lead to great product plans! You need very special skills and training to be able to turn market opportunities into successful product strategies.

And of course, we need to get rid of no-value web sites and replace them with linkages to the information sources that matter and enhance them with tools to enable various people inside and outside the company to talk and communicate with one another. But shouldn’t you have someone in charge of that? Or do you believe that a free-for-all environment will result in an infrastructure where the customer will find what they need in a timely fashion?

And yes – marketing is too often focused on “capturing and holding customers, rather than “finding and satisfying customer needs”.” As John Hagel says, they need to move from the 3I’s (intercept, insulate, and inhibit) to the 3 A’s (attract, assist, and affiliate) – no question about it! But shouldn’t you have someone take the lead in that?

Look, you can argue that you do not really need a marketing department – and for practical reasons, I think you do. But you cannot argue that a company should have no marketing. Marketing is what a company should do. Everyone within the company should wear a marketing hat!

And yes, neo was right – “the problem is choice!”

[Tags: marketing marketing department marketing strategy marketing role]

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]

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]

I do not want to get in the middle of the prophet cartoon controversy as I am an unconditional supporter of free speech and a free press – and I have many good Muslim friends.

But it is worth pointing to this recent upheaval as a possible example of the power of self-organization. According to James Turner Johnson, Professor of Religion at Rutgers University, and as quoted in veteran CIA Michael Scheuer’s book Imperial Hubris, each Muslim has a personal responsibility to contribute to the fight against any attack by a non-Muslim on the Islamic faith, on Muslims, or on Muslim territory. This does not require the authorization by a central leader or leadership. Once Islam is attacked, it is each Muslim’s personal duty to fight, and he needs no one else’s authority, not even his parents to do so. In fact it is considered a sin not to do so.

If that’s so, no one has to call for violence for it to happen. As long as the story that Islam is under attack is a believable one, one that fits within the worldview of the followers, this kind of violence will emerge spontaneously. And the more you try to squelch it from the top down, the stronger the movement will become. This is not a command and control type environment – this is cultural/religious DNA-based self-organization at work.

It would be interesting to be able to harness that kind of self-organization power in the governance of societies, countries, and companies.

Related resources:
To see the cartoons in question – check out the Brussels Journal

[Technorati Tags: self organization emergence religion prophet cartoons Islam]