Category: Management

HBS Working Knowledge has an excerpt from a new book “How Breakthroughs Happen”: “Technology brokers have discovered how to bridge the disparate worlds they move among outside their boundaries, and how to build new ventures from the technologies and people they come across. In the process, they have developed four intertwined work practices that help them do this: capturing good ideas, keeping ideas alive, imagining new uses for old ideas, and putting promising concepts to the test.”

Continue reading Flow of Ideas

VentureBlog quotes Abigail Johnson:

If a company is trying to define and lead a market, a down, quiet market is a great opportunity to take the time for the market education process that will inevitably be needed. Regardless of the state of the market, education will be needed. But in today’s market, an interesting, new idea can get an unfair mindshare compared to the way it was a few years ago. And, if a special, potential leader doesn’t do this, there is a good chance that they will go through their life as an also-ran.

What are the benefits of well-thought out and executed strategic communications? Those who lead the market ultimately can lower their cost of capital. This may manifest in many ways:

a. Better strategic partnerships
b. Better employees
c. Higher prices for products
d. Better valuations
e. Etc.

What’s involved in such strategic communications and market education?

Step One: Define the vision and the company’s core differentiation

Step Two: Articulate these clearly

Step Three: Begin to seed the market to begin to get influencers to see the world from a new perspective

Step Four: Continue this process through education, announcements, strategic marketing activities, etc.

Step Five: Continue this process through education, announcements, strategic marketing activities, etc.

Step Six: Continue this process through education, announcements, strategic marketing activities, etc.

Notice that this is NOT publicity or hype. Though some of the tools used to accomplish this strategic communications probably include working with the press and analysts, the goal of this kind of effort is a long-term market understanding of a company’s leadership.

My message is: it’s time for you to help companies understand the opportunity they are facing and to seize the day to define their fundamental differentiation and strategic communications plan.

The advice has come at the right time for us!

From the foreword to Rick Chapman’s new book, In Search of Stupidity, written by Joel Spolsky:

If you want to be successful in the software business, you have to have a management team that thoroughly understands and loves programming, but they have to understand and love business, too. Finding a leader with strong aptitude in both dimensions is difficult, but its the only way to avoid making one of those fatal mistakes that Rick catalogs lovingly in this book.

Fast Company writes about how “smart companies are discovering that you don’t need big budgets to deliver a big message. By cleverly cultivating buzz, small businesses with tiny budgets can level the playing field with established giants. Their motto: When it comes to building a brand, word of mouth is priceless.”

More important are people whom Marian Salzman calls “bees.” These folks aren’t satisfied just knowing the next cool thing. They live to spread the news — and others listen to them. “Bees are the critical link between the genesis of a trend and its ultimate incarnation in the world of the mainstream consumer,” Salzman explains. Harness their power, she says, and watch the news spread, from cell phone to email to Weblog to cash register.

t’s all about influencing the influencers. “Finding the superconnectors is the key to a targeted, successful buzz strategy. Go to the trend spreaders and plant yourself intelligently on their radar”, says Salzman.

ACM Ubiquity has an interview with management consultant Laurence Prusak, author of “What’s the Big Idea”. Some quotes:

One [of the big ideas in the book] the whole notion of “Idea Practitioner.” We wanted to identify a group of people who we felt had never been acknowledged or even written about in past management literature. And these are Idea Practitioners — people who, for whatever reasons, are intrinsically motivated, and who latch on to new ideas and bring them into the organization and fight for them. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose, but they do this over and over.

People like that tend to be disruptive. If I’m the head person of an organization, they’ll come to me and say: “Wait a minute.” Or they’ll come with some new idea that they actually want me to think about! It’s Quality, it’s Knowledge Management, it’s Reengineering, it’s Management By Objectives, it’s whatever. We have a list of several hundred ideas in the back of that book, and even so, there are many more Big Ideas we just didn’t list. Most people in organizations — including the executive — just want to maintain an equilibrium. They’d like to just keep going along doing tomorrow what they did yesterday. But then these Idea Practitioners come in and they disturb the equilibrium. I mean, if someone’s telling you about a new idea you need to listen to, it means what you’re doing could be improved upon or is wrong — and people don’t always like hearing that.

Meg Whitman points out the changing nature of eBay from just an online auctioneer:

Nearly 26% of our sales were settled in a fixed Nprice format, called Buy it Now. This feature allows sellers to attach a price to their auctions.

Another thing that not everybody knows about eBay is that its a very flexible channel for large sellers. We have made a tremendous amount of progress enabling big sellers to sell in volume.

Many small businesses, for example, are finding eBay to be a very attractive place, both for selling their products and for outfitting their offices. And were looking at new areas. Services is a new marketplace on eBay.

Another thing thats important to know about eBay is that were a global marketplace. We now have operations in 27 countries around the world.

A lasting point: “The need for online trading communities seems endless.”

From the first part of the speech: “What we see with eBay is a community of users who adapt this online marketplace to their particular needs. I think it is one of the most flexible platforms Ive ever seen in terms of making it just right for buyers and just right for sellers. Thats why weve succeeded.”

Continue reading eBay’s New Directions

Sometimes the most innovative ideas are also seemingly most simplest. Says Mark Pilgrim: “I find that a good measure of how innovative a thing is, is how vehemently people declare it trivial and obvious in hindsight.”

This is what we all seek – an idea which is, as Atanu put it for RISC, “both blindingly obvious and fleetingly elusive.”

Dennis Kennedy writes: “There are four points in the email process at which you can have a significant impact on email management: before a message sent to you, when you send a message, when or as you receive a message, and when you store or delete a message. An approach that attacks each of these four points will bring you the greatest benefit, but taking steps at any one or more of them will also help you.”

The Economist writes:

As they search for growth opportunities, companies face a classic dilemma, one made more poignant by recent events: should they assume that the future will, more or less, be a continuation of the past; or should they try to anticipate the next big revolution? Should they, essentially, hang on to what they’ve got (their core competence), or should they strike out for a brave new world?

After the dotcom disaster and much idle talk of a new economic paradigm, revolutions are distinctly out of favour. Belief in rapid change and dramatic responses has been shaken by the bursting of the stockmarket bubble, and by the demise of such firms as Enron and Webvan. There is now a widespread aversion to management fads. Most managers today are more interested in getting the basics right than in chasing the next rainbow.

Dana Blankenhorn writes:

It’s mainly about putting computing back into the background of business life. Gerstner’s era was about computing in the foreground — PCs, the Internet. Palmisano’s mantra is “on-demand computing” — power and results that flow like water from a faucet.

But there is a problem. Computing isn’t really a utility. It’s not water, not electricity. Every problem a computer faces is different. Hardware and software still lack the flexibility of the human mind. Will they that ever change? Not under the current silicon, on-off paradigm. There is no intuition, there aren’t enough links between data points. There is no ability for silicon and software, by themselves to say “ah ha!” They can beat a man at chess, but only by knowing the man. No one chess program can take on all comers.

Rather than calling it “on-demand” computing, perhaps you should think of Palmisano’s concept as “background computing.” It won’t produce stars. It will serve the business, not lead it.

Continue reading Palmisano’s IBM