What makes successful people successful?

What makes successful people successful?

Feb 3, 2017 | Leadership

Success is driven by a combination of insight, common sense and hard work, not luck, knowing the right people, or having a rich father, although the last two can be a good start.

It is also a given that successful people are usually pretty smart, although pretty smart people are not always successful.

Looking at medium sized businesses  as I do day in and day out, I see a range of all of the above, and find that above all else, the characteristic that distinguishes the successful from the rest is curiosity.

Curiosity about the world around them, the workings of their own business  and those of their competitors and allies, about the drivers of change and behaviour.

Broken down further, Curiosity comes from a number of sources, and I tend to score those I work with, generally very informally, on a range of parameters, which gives me an insight to their ‘curiosity quotient’.

They do not guess.  Rather than be happy to guess, they tend to experiment find ways to form and test hypotheses about the causes of the things around them. They do not just jump to a conclusion, they employ what I learnt at school was called the ‘scientific method’, often unconsciously.  Jumping to a conclusion that offers an easy explanation delivers a seductive but almost always wrong answer, particularly when done without deep domain knowledge.

They engage with problems physically.  This probably sounds a bit mad,  but those who are curious need to see and feel a problem, engage with it physically in some way. Leading a large marketing team in a highly seasonal market, one of the ways I seemed to be able to predict those who would be successful marketers was that they were happy to get out in the peak season and pack shelves in supermarkets, talk to those supermarket employees who managed the shelves, talk to customers as they shopped, and tap into the wisdom of the part time merchandisers we had while they drove from store to store. They engaged physically with the competitive environment in which customers  and the myriad of things, often the unconscious choices that led the purchase of one of our products Vs an alternative. Somehow they could ‘smell’ the issues.

They welcome the thought that they do not know. By embracing their ignorance they are able to engage with alternatives, see things with fresh eyes, and make new hypotheses about the drivers of behaviour.

They look beyond the obvious.  The obvious explanation of some happening are often not the best, or even accurate explanation of the behaviour.

They make their own judgements. Right or wrong good people form a judgement, and are prepared and able to defend it, while taking into consideration any new or revised information that is provided, and absorb that into the views and change as necessary. They are flexible people, not tied to a set of preconceptions, while at the same time being decisive. Procrastination is not a part of the DNA.

They never assume that the past will be repeated. They consider the past to be a indicator of what might happen, not the driver, so they dig into the guts of a process, behaviour drivers, and science, to come up with the fundamentals that drive everything else. The psychology of behaviour has not changed much over the millennia, our understanding of the fundamentals has increased daily. Those with curiosity seek to sweep away the assumptions based on simple extrapolation.

They make themselves experts. Rather than relying on so called experts from elsewhere, they ensure they at least know enough to subject those so called experts to challenging and informed questions in conversations to test their expertise.

They remain focused on the issues, and are relentless in pursuit of information that informs.

They make decisions based on data rather than emotions. They seek the facts that underlie the data. Our lives are so immersed in so called data, stuff spewed out of computers that takes on a credibility of its own simply because it has been digitised, that it has acted to erode our own judgement of facts. Digital garbage is still garbage. The really curious seek the truths in the facts, not hyperbolic leaps of faith proposed by dodgy data.

 

Can the government’s innovation initiative innovate us out of the funk?

Can the government’s innovation initiative innovate us out of the funk?

Feb 1, 2017 | Governance, Innovation, Personal Rant

Peter Drucker said something like “innovation is the only truly sustainable competitive advantage”.

Having just re-read his 1985 musings on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, after 20 or so years, the degree of his foresight is truly astonishing. It is great to have a Prime Minister who supposedly understands how to make a buck, and the strategic, commercial and competitive challenges of bringing new products to market. He may be one of the few in Canberra who do, but at least it is a fair start.

With much fanfare the Government on December 3 last year tabled in Parliament a Senate  report on ‘Australia’s innovation System.’  However, with the exception of Professor  Roy Greens valuable contribution as an appendix, I see little of real  value in the report beyond a few worthwhile observations and some useful changes to the tax treatment of entrepreneurial endeavours.

Our venerable Senators have had summarised for them documents (I wonder how much consideration these busy important people actually gave to the detail of the submissions) that may have started with some valuable ideas but which have been sanitised into a document long on rhetoric and disturbingly short on anything of value, which can only be delivered when someone asks the question “What now”?

As someone who has run an agency outsourced from the Federal bureaucracy charged with identifying and delivering innovation to a specific sector, I can attest from first hand just how powerful the cultural forces are against anything with even a hint of risk, change, or long term thinking in the public sector.

Successful innovation takes all three, plus a clear definition of the problems to be addressed.

There is little evidence of anything in the report that encourages me to think that the status quo will be truly challenged.

It is useful to look to successful models, and there are none more successful than the US since the second war. Most will now assume I am jumping to Google, Apple et al, but no. If you look deep enough you will see the hand of government at a deep level making very long term investments in basic science, building knowledge that the private sector then leverages with innovation.

A scientist named Vannevar Bush (no relation to the Bush pollies) was commissioned by President Roosevelt just before he died to report on what needed to be done to promote research and development and the commercial innovation it drives, just as this senate inquiry has done. Bush reported to president Truman in 1945, delivering his report, “Science, the Endless Frontier” which laid out the proposition:

“Basic research leads to new technology. It provides scientific capital. It creates a fund from which the practical application of knowledge must be drawn”.

Directly resulting from this report was the National Science Foundation. Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA  and several other institutes charged with the charter to do basic science, of discovering new knowledge.

When you look at all the products disrupting industries up to today, and changing our lives, many if not most of them have their roots in the various agencies spawned by Bush’s farsighted ideas, and the ability of the scientific agencies concerned to outlive the political cycle. (that longevity may be tested now with the new President Trump apparently running amok)

Now compare that to Australia’s situation.

CSIRO used to be a great agency, capable of developing technology like the wireless technology in the 70’s now in every mobile phone after 30 years on the shelf until a commercial use was found. Scientific Capital at work.

Now CSIRO is a politicised dysfunctional rump of its former self, with a little of the funding ripped out over each of the last 15 years of hubris, restored via this latest in a long line of Innovation “initiatives” to the sounds of grateful clapping. I see few practical remedies for the past 30 years of innovation vandalism being actually addressed, although at least a real start may have been made.

As I always say in workshops, “the best time to start an innovation initiative was 10 years ago, the second best time is now”.

Let’s hope it is not too late for Australian manufacturing, and being an optimist, I do believe that we will overcome the barriers built by inertia, lack of a clearly articulated Australian view of our place in the world, self interest, and short term political opportunism.

 

Net rule No.1: Own your own space.

Net rule No.1: Own your own space.

Jan 30, 2017 | Marketing, Social Media

Two recent events have put starkly into the spotlight the need to control your own space on the internet. When you use the space of another, you are just one of a huge number of a mass of irrelevant renters, and the landlord is able, indeed likely, to screw you at some point, as you have absolutely no power in the relationship.

First, Hewlett Packard. In September last year a change to the chips in some printers delivered via the net stopped those printers using anything other than the high priced HP ink working. In other words buy our printer, and we will control which ink you use, and we will actively prevent you making the choice for an alternative, and forget to tell you.  This post by Cory Doctorow, one of the most creative thinkers about things digital on the Boing Boing site  gives the details. A disgusting use of the power that H-P has taken by stealth, that would have the founders turning in their graves.

Second, LinkedIn last weekend. LinkedIn has developed as a remarkable tool offering the opportunity to connect widely, in exchange for just your personal details and commercial history, which they used to flog advertising. While we accepted the exchange, most dislike the ads that chase us around, latching onto the cookies sites we visit sneak onto our drives. Then Microsoft paid $US26 Billion for them and we knew, if we thought about it, that it would just get worse. Late last year LinkedIn told us they were going to ‘retire’ a couple of the really useful tools on the free version at the end of February. Disappointing, but not unexpected. The changes came in last weekend, a bit before the anointed date, and to call them wholesale is an understatement.

Having spent a bit of time last week poking around in the bits of LinkedIn left open to those on the free version, the changes have not just been a few tools removed, and a new look, it has been a wholesale gutting of the functionality. Unless you pay the piper, and the piper is being pretty greedy, the functionality we have become used to LinkedIn delivering, which is what made it so successful, has largely gone.

This will leave many with the choice of pay up or don’t bother any more.

It also highlights again the absolute necessity of building your on line presence on a platform you own.

Like many, I have made coaching my clients on the functionality of LinkedIn a part of my offering. In my case it is a small but important part of the value I have delivered to my SME clients. Many others by contrast have built a business  around flogging strategically superficial advice about how to leverage LinkedIn to generate leads and sales. I guess the side benefit is that those superficial methods are now into the  digital waste-bin, and we will need to get back to the nitty gritty of developing strategies and tactics that rely on our own capabilities and domain knowledge to work, rather than renting influence from digital landlords.

 

 

January 26, 2017, and is all well?

January 26, 2017, and is all well?

Jan 26, 2017 | Personal Rant

It is Australia day today, and it has become my tradition to make some comment on the community in which we live, rather than addressing an issue of commercial sustainability, the main meal for the other 200 odd days on which I post.

What a welcome change, if somewhat depressing for me as I survey the stuff happening around us.

As I re-read the post I did for Australia Day 2016, it is hard to see what I missed, and not a lot has changed, unless for the worse.

In NSW we have a new premier, as of Monday. I have met Ms. Berejiklian on several occasions, and she is a seriously impressive person. However, I am a little concerned that the whole rhetoric has been about ‘her’ government, and ‘her’ priorities, which are clearly different to those of the previous premier, to whom she was the deputy and treasurer. It seems like there has not just been a change of person at the top, but a wholesale change as if she had nothing to do with the previous government, was nothing more than a bystander.

This does bother me, as it is an abrogation of responsibility for the decisions taken and changes made to the lives of many.

Nevertheless, we seem to have it good compared to our septic friends, who had the choice between two equally awful choices last November, and stayed away from the poll booths in droves, and got something they may live to regret  by default. Trouble is, the man now in charge of the most powerful military and economy the world has ever seen appears to be an egocentric  sociopath with no acquaintance with the truth or any form of consistent values . Will it affect us here on the other side? Who really knows, but I suspect at best we are in for a bit of a hairy ride.

And then I look at Canberra.

Our PM has been a grave disappointment to me. I thought that at last we had someone who knew what it took to make a bob in the private sector, who was independently wealthy, so did not need the pension  and trappings that go with the power. At last it seemed, we had a chance of some backbone and principal emerging. No such luck it would appear. But then there is the opposition leader, who seems to have pioneered the political practise of ‘Alternative fact‘ in the election campaign, blatantly lying, repeatedly, about the intentions of the government on Medicare. I guess he can claim if nothing else that the new US president has taken a leaf from his playbook.

We seem to have lost something from my childhood, now a long time ago. A sense of community, that  we are all in this together, now it seems it is every man for himself, the rest be buggared. This is reflected in every part of our community, and usually Social Media gets the blame, but I suspect that is too simplistic.

We evolved as a social species because we needed each other, had to trust each other and the group, to survive the depredations of the sabre tooth tigers, weather, and marauding tribes from across the river. Those threats have largely been eliminated, so we have forgotten how to behave, and just blame the poor behaviour on Social media instead of taking the responsibility on our own shoulders. I wonder how we would take a real crisis, one that threatened us as were our fathers and grandfathers in 1939. Hopefully the DNA would kick in and we would again find strength in community.

There seems to have been lots of emotional discussion about the nature of  ‘Australia Day’, particularly as it relates to indigenous Australians.  It seems forever, but we have only had an official Australia day and holiday on January 26 since the bicentennial in 1988. prior to that there was a mish mash that differed across time and location. I think we should just get on with trying to live together, maintaining the inclusive and  tolerant society that made us great. So what if the last 219 years is but a spec on the 60,000 year history of human habitation? Life did change 219 years ago for the then inhabitants, and some terrible things were done, but nowhere near as bad or widespread as has happened many times since in many places around the world, and continue to happen today. Stop wasting time on irrelevancies, accept the reality that Australia is still the best place on earth to live, and get on with it.

There must be something in the water, an osmotic process of some sort transmitting the concerns. My 9 month old granddaughter on Monday, about the time President Trump was taking the oath of office, started hugging her stuffed sheep as if her life depended on it, and has not let it go since.

Co-incidence , or some alignment of the cosmos felt only by the most innocent among us?

 

 

The greatest self-delusion of marketers.

The greatest self-delusion of marketers.

Jan 24, 2017 | Marketing

We marketers are great at deluding ourselves, we do it about all sorts of things, often to justify the resources we are consuming in the absence of hard numbers.

It is one thing to ‘get away’ with convincing the corner office that the number of ‘Likes’ on Facebook is a valid measure of our success, it is quite another when we actually believe it.

However, the greatest self-delusion in my experience remains undetected most of the time.

We mistake habit for loyalty.

Our marketing strategy and activities are normally about finding those to whom we add great value, and by hook or crook, getting them to stick to us in preference to a competitor. We go through processes now often summarised as ‘the buyer journey’ trying to create order in the place of the chaotic behaviour that is normal in our lives, creating diagrams like the one above,

Those few who we call ‘heavy users’ or some such term, we would also usually call ‘Loyal’ customers.

I would propose that in most cases they are not loyal, you have just managed to make it easy for them in some way, so they are habitual users rather than loyal users.

Habitual users do not think much about you beyond the transaction, unless you change something, the price, or availability, terms of service, whatever it is that they value from you, then they will consider the purchase in the  new light.

If they choose to stay, they are loyal, if they leave, or try an alternative, they are just habitual. In addition, the loyal users will proselytise to their networks the benefits of your product, habitual users will not bother.

Make sure you know the difference.