Category: Management

Guy Kawasaki interviews Chip and Dan Heath about their new book, “Made to Stick.”

We found there were six principles (SUCCES) that link sticky ideas of all kinds. Sticky ideas wont always have all six, but the more, the merrier.

For example, JFKs idea to put a man on the moon in a decade had all six of them:

1. Simple: A single, clear mission.
2. Unexpected: A man on the moon? It seemed like science fiction at the time.
3. Concrete: Success was defined so clearlyno one could quibble about man, moon, or decade.
4. Credible: This was the President of the U.S. talking.
5. Emotional: It appealed to the aspirations and pioneering instincts of an entire nation.
6. Story: An astronaut overcomes great obstacles to achieve an amazing goal.

Here. Vendor Relationship Management is the reciprocal of Customer Relationship Management.

VC Confidential writes about some of the attributes:

Resourceful: he/she should be weary of raising capital and be thoughtful about taking on any dilution. Large capital raises limits exit potentials, defocuses management and ends up usually being wasted.
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Relentless: Technology is all about being the market leader (as they say, who was the second person to fly across the Atlantic?). I like CEO’s who are competitive and paranoid about the competition.
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Creative Thought: we appreciate entrepreneurs who look at problems differently. Successful companies do so not by doing things the same way as their competitors.

John Hagel writes:

I have a growing sense that all the major Internet players Google, MSN, Amazon, Ebay and AOL have lost their sense of direction and differentiation. Rather than carving out and rapidly enhancing areas of distinctive advantage, these major players appear to be leaping like lemmings into the red ocean.
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This growing homogenization of the leadership ranks might be understandable if the Internet were a maturing business arena. Given the rapid and sustained pace of innovation in the underlying technology, the rapid growth of usage, the continuing shift of spending to the Internet and the proliferation of new businesses created on the Internet, I find it hard to characterize this space as maturing my sense is that it is still in its infancy.

I came across this May 2003 article by John Hagel which is as relevant today:

FAST in this case is an acronym for Focus, Accelerate, Strengthen and Tie it all together. This approach urges executives to move along parallel paths, operating on two very different time horizons: one horizon takes a five to ten year view of the business and the second horizon zooms in to a much more tactical six to twelve month view of the business. The one to five year horizon that is so loved by traditional business strategists actually receives very little attention in the FAST approach.

VentureWoods has an abstract from HBR’s December article:

Based on Clayton Christensens disruptive-innovation model, catalytic innovations challenge organizational incumbents by offering simpler, good-enough solutions aimed at underserved groups.

Unlike disruptive innovations, though, catalytic innovations are focused on creating social change. Catalytic innovators are defined by five distinct qualities.

First, they create social change through scaling and replication.

Second, they meet a need that is either overserved (that is, the existing solution is more complex than necessary for many people) or not served at all.

Third, the products and services they offer are simpler and cheaper than alternatives, but recipients view them as good enough.

Fourth, they bring in resources in ways that initially seem unattractive to incumbents.

And fifth, they are often ignored, put down, or even discouraged by existing organizations, which dont see the catalytic innovators solutions as viable.

Forbes writes:

What comes through in the biography and in the discussion onstage with Tedlow is how Grove made his biggest decisions: by stepping outside himself and viewing the situation coolly, at a distance.

Case in point: a fateful decision in 1985. At the time, Intel was reeling from losses in its memory chip business due to sharp competition from Japanese manufacturers. Grove had spent months wrestling with the problem, including petitioning the U.S. government to take action. Frustrated, he asked Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, “If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?” Moores answer: quit making memory chips. “Why shouldnt you and I walk out the door, come back and do it ourselves?” Grove responded. So they did.
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Stepping outside your own concerns and pride, finding a new solution and then reentering is tough for any of us. Its far easier to pontificate on other peoples problems than to see our own clearly. But as Grove has shown, true self-awareness can be our most valuable asset.

The New York Times has a story about what P&G is doing:

Procter is joining a growing list of mainstay marketers trying to reach consumers in nontraditional ways, including podcasts, blogs, video games, e-mail messages, cellphones, video-on-demand and pop-up retail stores that stay open only for a short time.

Marketers are eager to experiment with those new methods because it is increasingly difficult to get the attention of busy, jaded consumers with conventional television commercials and print advertisements. Also, nontraditional campaigns can use technology that enables them to be aimed more precisely at the audiences that would most appreciate them and avoid those who might not get the joke.

Tim O’Reilly discusses giveaways. “The long and the short of it: though some readers were skeptical, Srini and Michael turned up some strong evidence that the ideas I wrote about are well on their way to becoming mainstream, with some business mavericks pushing them further and faster than anyone might have expected. Stay tuned for a future that is very different from the past. The big question for entrepreneurs: what is the razor, and what is the blade?”

Barron’s writes:

In its most recent quarter, software accounted for a fifth of IBM’s revenue and, surprisingly, for the bulk of its earnings — some 40%, up from 29% five years ago. Under Palmisano, IBM is reinventing itself again. It’s shed its disk-drive and personal-computer businesses to focus on less volatile operations with fatter margins, and has boosted productivity by slashing costs and spreading facilities around the globe.

Welcome to the New Big Blue, the world’s second-largest software company — quite a change from the hardware giant that invented the disk drive 50 years ago and lived high on the mainframe, or the service outfit it successfully morphed into under Gerstner — one whose revenues had stalled in recent years. “We have globally integrated the supply chain, software development, services delivery,” says Palmisano. “I would say we’re just two or three years into a multi-year journey, with ongoing productivity gains to be had. As a result of all this work, IBM today is much more focused than we were four years ago.”