Oct 25, 2010 | Collaboration, Communication, Social Media
Why is it that in the face of plummeting communication costs, and remarkable availability of new tools to make it easy, that business travel continues to grow?
On first glance, we should be travelling less, not more, but on further consideration, perhaps it is the richness of the face to face engagement and the potential to develop “social capital” with customers, geographically spread colleagues and suppliers that is keeping us on the planes, and the communication tools let us keep on top of the necessary crap in the office without having to be there.
Travel may be complementary to other communication costs, rather than the new tools being a substitute for travel as we all assumed to now.
The depth of personal, face to face communication cannot be substituted by the width possible with social tools, as looking someone physically in the eye involves having some “skin in the game”, putting yourself out there in a way not equalled by electronic means. The evolution of communities and the social capital that keeps them glued to gather, will see roles changing, but the physical handshake cannot be substituted by exchanged electrons.
Oct 24, 2010 | Collaboration, Customers, Innovation, Leadership, Social Media, Strategy
Creating and managing a development portfolio is a critical factor in the success of most commercial enterprises, but one that is done poorly in many I have seen. Some recent with a client struggling with the challenge for his organization served to clarify my thoughts, and assisted his organisation to develop a portfolio discipline that appears to be working well.
Success is much more than just using a few tools, of which there are many, it is about how the enterprise at its core deals with ambiguity, trade-offs, and the challenge of being frustrated and wrong a lot of the time, whilst being sufficiently resilient to keep on batting, and batting hard. As Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favors the prepared mind” and nothing creates chance like persistence tempered with learning from each experience.
Below are some of the things that appear to me to be of importance
- Have a clear strategy. Without a clearly articulated business strategy that has commitment from those responsible for implementation, how can you possibly have a Product development and commercialization portfolio with any hope of success?
- Self awareness. Know what you do not know as well as what you do know, and where the knowledge about what you do not know may reside, particularly if it is with a competitor.
- Externalities. Understand the forces driving developments that may create opportunities in the industries you target, and the commercial and competitive imperatives that drive the decision making of individual customers and potential customers in those industries.
- People. Have access to great people, both internal and external in a variety of ways to extract a range of informed views and data upon which to build a case. Use the emerging communication tools to link these people and leverage their knowledge and experience
- Sponsorship. Ensure there is a senior level executive sponsor for each project that emerges from the pack. This person should have the passion, knowledge and position to carry the case for resource allocation, risk management, and strategic fit to the senior decision maker in the enterprise.
- Endless polishing. Keep polishing the portfolio, it will never be a completed exercise, it is a live entity always, and needs TLC. Part of the polishing is creation of a “carpark” which captures ideas, issues, technologies, and all the sometimes random stuff that can create that “Eureka” moment when things suddenly come together in a new way. Revisit the carpark regularly.
- PDCA. Be prepared to experiment, trial, look for insights, learn by doing, but be aggressive about performance, and relegation and promotion to and from the carpark, and further through the development process, and learn from all that experience.
- Customers. Engage customers as early and as often as possible, after all, they are the ones whose problems your product is supposed to solve, and they are usually full of problems and improvement ideas, some of which may be of value to you.
- Dare to be different. No successful new product did the job just the same as something that already exists, that is just a price-fight, differentiation is fundamental to success.
- NPD is everybody’s job. Product development and idea evolution happens holistically, not by functional line, and it must be a priority for every stakeholder in and around the enterprise, not just something that requires attendance by the marketing personnel at a meeting every second Tuesday at 10am .
There you go, sounds pretty easy!
Oct 11, 2010 | Communication, Marketing, Social Media
That democratic cliché “freedom of the press” is a bit misleading, because to be able to exercise it, you needed to own or control the capital equipment and distribution channel to get your message out, so clearly this freedom was limited to a very few.
However, freedom of the press has an entirely new dimension, as now anyone can publish, you just need a computer and a weblog account. Of course, you still have to get people to engage with what is written, but you can put it out there easily and cheaply.
This change in the balance of power is the most compelling change in the nature of news gathering and dissemination process since the invention of the printing press, and it is pretty clear that the “old” press is struggling with commercial sustainability, whilst on the flip side, the views on the web need a greater level of skepticism than the Financial Review.
Freedom of the press, and freedom of speech are now pretty much the same thing in most places around the world, we just need to be careful about believing what we read.
Oct 4, 2010 | Alliance management, Collaboration, Operations, Social Media
Somehow, there is an evolutionally phenomenon at work that kicks in when a group gets larger than 150-200, the number that social research has repeatedly identified as the number of people that any individual can have a relationship with, first postulated by anthropologist Robin Dunbar, and now commonly known as “Dunbar’s number.“
As humans evolved, they did so in groups of 200 maximum, and there was little serious conflict inside the group, but there was constant conflict with the similar sized groups in the vicinity, even though they were to all intents and purposes, identical, apart from their group membership.
We now have social media seemingly rewriting the rules, or is Facebook and similar networks the electronic equivalent of a genetic mutation?
In a situation where you have many more than the genetic 200 having a sort of a relationship facilitated by the net, what implications does this mutation, if that is what is, have on the way we should be thinking about using, and regulating access to these sites, and what are the implications in the management of conflict?.
These are very big questions for the next 20 years thay deserve more than a passing, and ideaology driven response.
Sep 28, 2010 | Branding, Communication, Customers, Social Media
Social media, as I keep saying, has changed the rules completely.
In the pre-digital days of mass marketing, the consumer simply ignored most of the stuff thrown at them, and there was no genuinely effective mechanism to measure the waste.
Now, using the tools of the web the task has changed, as we can measure many dimensions of a messages effectiveness very quickly, and effectively, so the waste is measurable, and the degree of engagement, or “opt-in” becomes a key performance measure of marketing.
This is a whole lot harder than going to lunch with the ad agency, and then just throwing money at the TV or popular magazine in the hope that some of it would stick, as we can now measure not just awareness, but the degree of consumer “opt-in” any communication generates.
Sep 27, 2010 | Customers, Marketing, Social Media
If you ever needed evidence of the power of social tools on the net to influence your brands, look at what is happening currently to the Wyeth S26 baby formula.
Greenpeace did a couple of tests that indicated there may be genetically modified ingredients in S26, a news program picked up on the tests, and overnight, the “twittersphere” is overrun with negative comments, and I am sure health Minister Nicola Roxons in-box is full.
Wyeth is yet to respond, at least as far as I have seen. Only 24 hours, and the damage to S26, a brand that has taken 25 years to build, has been trashed. If you have not got contingency plans in place to counter this when it happens to you, I think you are mad!
