May 10, 2013 | Innovation, Small business
Yesterday, watching a bee that had snuck in my office window trying to get out, I was reminded of a simple fact that to my mind is a great metaphor.
Put a few bees in a bottle, and point the bottom towards a light source, and the bees will all belt themselves against the bottle bottom, never finding the open end. Flies by contrast buzz around at random, and eventually will, by luck, find their way out the open end.
Running a portfolio of R&D projects is a bit like having a lineup of bottles full of bees.
For some bottles you need to have light very focussed at one point, in order to concentrate the effort at that point, others you need a wider light source to enable a wider scope of activity, and others, you need light all around, with one small exit, so that eventually the disciplined bees will find the opening, and escape.
If all you have in the bottles are flies, exercising discipline is a pointless exercise, as flies just buzz at random irrespective of external motivation. You need bees, and multiple potential light sources.
Getting the right mix of disciplined process and the connection of the apparently random dots that make the “wow” moment is the core task of those running a portfolio of projects.
May 8, 2013 | Change, Management, Strategy
Success is the result of hard work, smarts, good teams, focus, with a hit of “right place, right time” thrown in, etc, etc, right? Right.
At least that is what I always believed, knocked into me by my Dad who believed, and lived by the credo that “the harder I work, the luckier I get”
Increasingly however, I am seeing success being a relative thing, significantly dependent on a whole host of factors outside our control, many that have perhaps only come into play since the net made our world so bloody complicated, immediate and transparent.
Bill Gates did well, right time and place with an idea that was new, but when he pitched it to IBM, the defining moment of his career, he was not to know that internally IBM had reached some strategic conclusions about how they would approach the emerging world of personal computing.
Contingency.
Ron Jones got fired three weeks ago from JC Penny, where he lasted 17 months after being hired to “Appelise” the aging department store retailer. The retail guru who saved Target, created the retail megastar that is Apple stores, failed to do anything but annoy JC Penny’s existing management who rebelled, and customers who went elsewhere.
Wrong strategy perhaps, but it had certainly worked before, demonstrating again the sensitivity of context, and that success is a fragile, elusive thing, dependent on all sorts of contingencies, making continuous experimentation a “must”.
May 7, 2013 | Branding, Communication, Small business, Social Media
You choose
Lets talk about social media for a moment, it is on the mind of most running SME’s. and it is the object of lots of “hype” by snake-oil salesmen.
There is a huge amount of very useful verbiage, and mountains of plain crap out there, as well as the “idiots guide” type stuff, but it at its core is really simple.
Remember what it was like as a kid in a new playground, you didn’t know anybody, it was lonely amongst a horde of other kids.
Slowly, one short sentence at a time, you got to know some, some you liked, others you did not want to get to know better.
The “liking” evolves over a series of small, at first disconnected interactions, slowly, the interactions become connected, and slowly, the network widens, as you start the interactgion process with others.
At some point, you ask another kid to come home and play, great if he can, but sometimes they can’t, you ask again, if they cannot a second time, with no apparent reason, you probably will not ask again, This is the “law of reciprocracy” at work. Relationships of any type are reciprocal, otherwise they are not relationship.
Just the same in social media, you need to give something before yuy can expect anything back, but get something back, and you reciproicate again, and you have the beginning of something, maybe. It takes work. You need to spend time at the other persons house, want to spend more time with them, be comfortable with what they do, think, and say.
No different in social media. All are different, are able to deliver you an outcome that varies from each other, you just need to understand clearly what you want, otherwise you will spend your limited time poorly. None of nthem, despite the hype are all things to all people. You choose who you like.
May 3, 2013 | Small business, Strategy, Uncategorized
Yesterday I did a presentation to a group of owners of small businesses, people who seemingly compete against the odds from a point of weakness, as almost everybody is bigger, better resourced, has better technology, and are more connected, than them.
As a basis for the presentation I used Simon Sineks great TED talk, that articulated the ” Why How What” model, one I have been able to use quite often as a means to assist SME’s sort out what is really important, and what just seems to be important, as they try to navigate the competitive challenges they face.
Just after I had delivered my thoughts, a great post from Seth Godin popped into my feed, and it added a further perspective to the challenges. For these small business people, working as hard as they can, trying to be “picked” by their potential customers, from amongst the baying crowd of potential suppliers is confronting and often disillusioning. How do they stand out from the crowd?
Seth’s point is do not be a part of the crowd of supplicants, do not wait for others to pick you, pick yourself by being different, useful, and interesting.
This is as true for the SME around the corner as it is to the huge multinational, but when you think about it a bit, the elephant is pretty hard to persuade to change direction, to be sufficiently agile to respond quickly, whilst the little bloke is far more able to turn on a sixpence.
It just takes the will, vision and balls to be different.
May 1, 2013 | Communication, Innovation, Social Media
20 years ago yesterday, April 30 1993, CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear research, the developer of what has become the W.W.W. announced that they would open it up, making it free to all by posting the codes on what became the worlds first website.
A computer based communication system had existed since 1985, when the first “domain” name had been registered, but it was the private property of individual universities and research organisations.
To my mind, this single action by CERN management in 1993 was the catalyst for the revolution we have undergone in the last 20 years, and which is still continuing, and this revolution (I am looking for a stronger word than just “revolution”) is at least as significant as the realisation that steam could be used to drive machines, and you could set up a system to mass produce the printed word.
In a number of TED talks over the years, there has been some extraordinary contributions to our understanding of the impact this decision has had.
Clay Shirky has mused about the brainpower released, the cogitative surplus, by the web, Kevin Kelly makes observations and predictions about the development of the web, and Ray Kurzweil wonders at the continuously accelerating pace of innovation that is occurring. All have made the point that the world has changed.
Tim Berners-Lee, now Sir Tim, was the man. He wrote the protocols that underpin the web HTML, et al, while working as a software engineer at CERN. The project was a part time indulgence, a side project, but then it went public.
To my mind, this is almost equivalent to the Big Bang, the day the world started, anew.
