Apr 29, 2023 | Change, Innovation
30 years ago tomorrow, April 30, 1993, the public internet was born with the announcement by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research that they would publicly release the HTTP protocols that would change the world. These protocols had been created by Tim (now Sir Tim) Berners-Lee for use by academic and defence facilities and had been very tightly held. On April 30, 1993 they were posted on what would become the world’s first website and were to be freely available to all.
10 years ago, I posted a happy 20th message.
Leading up to that momentous release of the HTTP protocols, providing the initial foundation for today’s internet, the US department of defence had created the ARPANET (Advanced Research projects Agency Network) in 1969. The first email message being sent by Ray Tomlinson who first used the @ symbol to separate the recipient’s name from the network address to himself in 1971. By 1983 there was general agreement on the standards for communication on the internet, the TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet protocol), and in 1985 the first domain, Symbolics.com was registered, which remains live today.
Once publicly released, the standardised protocols saw a mobilisation of innovative resources from around the world, resulting in rapid development of uses and tools.
Mosaic, the first popular web browser was launched in late 1993, and later was renamed Netscape navigator, and Yahoo launched in 1994. Microsoft launched their competitive search tool Explorer in 1995, later incorporating it free into Windows, leading to the move by the Clinton government to take action under the antitrust laws in 1998, resulting in an order to break up Microsoft. This order was later lost on appeal, significantly due to the evolving dominance of Google as the preferred search engine. Amazon launched in 1995, Google in 1998 and amongst the wave of tech IPO’s in 1999 was Napster, the first peer to peer file sharing service.
From the launch of Wikipedia in 2001, we again had a wave of launches, most of which failed, but a few became the unicorns that changed our lives, Facebook 2004, YouTube 2005, iPhone 2007, Instagram 2010, and so it continues.
The most recent inflection is obviously the explosion of AI tools since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022.
If you extrapolated from this birthday out to the next milestone, the 40th, the only thing we can say for sure is that you would be wildly, massively wrong. That happens every time such an inflection point is reached. Extrapolation is useless, instead we need to experiment and innovate, a continuous process that will take us in completely unpredictable directions.
I hope I am around to see it.
Apr 27, 2023 | Change, Governance, Lean
While there is no silver bullet, there is a lot of tactical advice around that will increase the dependability and resilience of your supply chains.
Shortening lead times, removing steps in the chain, paying a premium for service to specification, creative logistic management, making information transparent, and many others.
All will deliver some benefit, and together can make a dramatic difference, but miss the essential nature of significantly improving supply chain performance.
When you ‘flip’ the chain, changing the drivers of the chain from supply to demand, the game changes.
Developing a clear view of demand, and responding only to the signals of demand, rather than the often functional signals coming from within the vertical management hierarchies of supply chain participants, alters the nature of the challenges being faced.
It becomes a demand chain, rather than a supply chain, or even a value chain.
In lean parlance, there is the concept of ‘Takt time’. This is a measure of the ‘pull’ put on a supply organisation by the demand from customers. It is the production time required to meet customer demand.
The so called ‘bullwhip effect’, the magnification of fluctuations in orders back through the supply chain will be at least mitigated by application of a metric that reflects real demand from the market.
Remember the panic buying of toilet paper, amongst other things, at the beginning of the pandemic? The underlying demand had not changed, we still all went to the loo at about the same rate. However, the sudden shortage on supermarket shelves created by panic buying resulted in supermarkets increasing their orders on suppliers, who in turn increased orders on their suppliers. At each point in the supply chain because of the uncertainty, everybody was increasing their orders, building inventory, magnifying the boom/bust cycle of supply, creating a ‘bullwhip’ effect. This is where the trajectory at the tip of the whip is progressively magnified by movement back through the length of the whip. Swung hard enough, it will ‘crack’ just like your supply chain.
The challenge is to match the whole supply chain to the real level of demand coming from the marketplace, demand uninfluenced by short term hiccups in the chain. If there is a silver bullet, that is it.
Apr 24, 2023 | Communication, Marketing
So called ‘Content Marketing” or alternatively, ‘inbound marketing’, has become the poster boy of marketing. It has attracted marketing budgets like a magnet in an iron filings factory.
Often, we see content that has been produced for contents sake, without any analytical consideration or real value. It has become so easy to produce superficial generalities that pass uninformed scrutiny using AI tools, that ‘thinking’ is becoming rare.
Creating content that will deliver a return is an investment, and like every investment, marketers should be looking for a return, seeking to improve the performance of the resources they deploy.
Just making assumptions, no matter how obvious, can end up badly.
As a young marketer, I made the huge mistake of assuming that consumers could see the pack of a product I managed through my eyes, and were as desperate as I was to rectify the damage it was clearly doing to a good brand.
That assumption was a huge mistake that nearly ended my budding marketing career before it really took off.
The point is that we are now just all creating content, assuming our current and potential customers can read our minds and see the value in it, be overwhelmed, and just buy.
Never happens, you must build a framework within which your content makes no assumptions. Following are a few seemingly simple steps:
Have goals for your content.
It does not matter how beautifully written and illustrated your content may be, if the reader does not know what you want them to do with it. When you want them to try a product, tell them. When you want them to sign up for a webinar, or free e-book, tell them.
Write for the persona.
Content with a commercial intent is different from being a journalist telling a wide story. You need to engage a very specific group of people and convert them to a transaction. This is best done by a skilled salesperson looking them in the eye, but the second best is great content that they see as written for them. To achieve this, you need to be very certain and specific of the desired audience. First step is creating those personas, and when you have them, write to them as you would a friend.
Write to a calendar.
This comes from knowing your audience and the markets they are in. If you are selling real estate, it makes more sense to write about the great outdoor entertaining area in spring, than the huge log fireplace which will keep the house warm. Keep that one for the autumn. It is also the case that your committed audience come to expect some sort of rhythm to your writing. Once a month, once a week, every day, whatever it is, establish and keep to the rhythm so that it becomes part of their lives. I consume a wide range of the content of others, the only common factor is that they all have a predictable rhythm.
Have your own voice.
Ensure you have a tone of voice that is consistent across all the platforms you use. I always recommend that my clients write their own content. They may have it researched, drafted, and a first draft edit by others, but they do the writing. In that way it is them speaking as close to one to one as they can get to the individuals in their audience.
Have your own ‘Home base’.
Content lasts forever once it is posted, it can continue to deliver for you, but it needs a home. The platforms out there make their money by collecting information attractive to advertisers, then restricting access unless you pay them for it. Facebook started with total access to the newsfeeds of those to whom you were connected, it is now down by most counts to less than 2%. LinkedIn has made huge changes since being bought by Microsoft as they progressively monetised the platform. All platforms are there to make a return, not to act as a public service. You must have your own home base, digital real estate that you own, that you can do with what you wish. The challenge of course is that you must figure out how to drive the traffic you want to your home.
Repurpose and resurrect your content.
Content once created and posted lasts forever, and can be used and reused many times, and in many forms, on the many different platforms. While the ‘half-life’ of content on a public platform like Facebook or twitter can be measured in a few minutes, content on your website is always there, can be found with a search, and can continue to deliver value for a long time. A number of my older posts deliver readers every day, many of whom stay, subscribe, and engage with the newer content as it is posted.
Leverage your analytics.
The free Google analytics package gives you a pile of information that can be used to improve what you are doing, and ensure it is finding the right audiences. Not using it is silly.
This is all simple to say, but very hard to do.
Like all things that are hard, it takes a considerable commitment to be able to stand out, be different, and deliver value that generates a return on your investment in content. You should recognise that digital marketing, if it is to be effective, is not ‘free’. Not only are you giving the platforms access to your eyeballs for further remarketing for their benefit, but you are also making the investment of your most valuable resources, time and energy.
You should always consider the return you receive from investments you make.
Header image credit: Dall-E robotic image generator
Apr 17, 2023 | Change, Innovation, Strategy
Over the years I have helped a number of start-ups. Almost all have been single or a few people who have a drive to start something they own, where they can call the shots, and be away from the dead hand of corporate bureaucracy. Sometimes this has been a formal assignment, more often, the result of a series of casual conversation in cafes, networking meetings, and at BBQ’s.
Across these conversations, there have been some consistent themes,
They focus too much on the little things that do not matter much in the long run.
Logo, company name, design of the proposed website, details that do not make or break a new business. At the early stages, these things can be easily changed, modified, and often are dumped.
What this does is take the attention away from what really does matter. Clearly defining the product and/or service to be provided, who is the most likely ‘ideal’ customer, why they should buy from you rather than elsewhere, and how they communicate with them about the value they can deliver without wasting resources. These are the things that matter. Their common characteristic is that they are qualitative, hard to measure, and they evolve.
Evolution happens on auto pilot, make it positive.
Things change, often they change while you are not looking, and only become evident with the benefit of hindsight, by which time it is sometimes too late to do much. The other side of the coin is that evolution also applies to the good things. The task of a new company is to set the guiderails so that the good stuff outweighs the bad. Alignment of all personnel and outside stakeholders is vital in this process, as the pressures will be coming from all sides. And like a child learning to walk, you need to have some of those guiderails in place, or you will wander off in random directions. I call it having a robust, deeply considered strategy.
Imposter syndrome always plays a role.
Unless you are a sociopath, imposter syndrome will grab you from time to time, you will feel out of your depth, wondering why everyone is looking to you for direction and confirmation. It will feel like that first time on a big public stage, dread about what is to come. When you look back, assuming you have done the preparation, you will recognise it for what it really is, a test, and a great learning opportunity.
Spreadsheets are liars.
Most businesses start with some sort of plan, most often articulated via a business plan template and a few spreadsheets. If you are looking for outside finance, these will be mandatory. However, I have never seen a spreadsheet or written plan that accurately reflects what actually happens. Most are nice, comfortable extrapolations of continuous growth along a predictable path. The growth of every successful business looks like a game of snakes and ladders. 3 steps forward, and whoopsie, 2 backwards. The trick is to ensure the steps upward and forward outweigh the falls. Sometimes this simply does not happen, and the snake hole swallows those who fall into it. Spreadsheets never allow for the ‘snake-holes’
Internal Vs External.
Most start-up failure comes from two sources. Firstly, from the lack of cash management. To my mind, there is no greater sins that not being proactive with cash, a simple set of disciplines often ignored. The second is because they have neglected the management of their customers by looking inwards, managing the inevitable personal and process friction that occurs, rather than looking at how they can add value to their customers. Customers do not care about your internal challenges, they are paying you to release them from theirs.
People are your greatest asset, and liability.
A business without people is just a scrawl on a piece of paper. A ‘micro-business’ which is what almost every business is at birth, can be strangled by one poor choice. Equally, that one choice can be the making of you. In the early days, when everyone is acting in all sorts of roles, you need people who are self-reliant, resilient, and happy to ‘muck in’. They are very hard to find, and even harder to keep when you do find them. Equally, when you think you have found the one, only to realise they are not as advertised, which is what they were doing during the interview, remove them quickly. A wrong employee at an early stage can become toxic very quickly. Sometimes that person is great at what they do, are seen by others to be vital, but they are a pain in the arse for some reason. Experience tells me that the benefits of what they are good at are usually outweighed by the hidden costs of them not being aligned with the rest of the team, and its objectives.
Being seduced by opportunity.
That old cliché of working in the business instead of on the business is almost always true in the early days. You will be swamped from all sides by problems as well as opportunities, both of which will radically dilute, if you allow it to, that characteristic of successful start-ups: focus. Plan for what comes next, focus your very limited resources on the key drivers of that outcome, and eliminate everything else. This is never easy, but is absolutely necessary.
None of this is easy, if it was, everybody would be doing it.
The failure rate of start-ups from the corner coffee shop to high-tech gizmos is very high.
Finding the right sort of outside ‘reality check’ advice and input that delivers true value is perhaps the eighth challenge, which so many get wrong, but which can change the outcome dramatically.
Header credit: Arrived via my new AI mate Dall-E
Mar 22, 2023 | Branding, Communication
‘If you want to change the world, change the metaphor‘. Joseph Campbell
Every storyteller knows how powerful metaphors are, we all use them to describe to ourselves and others, the complex situations and challenges we face. The tales our parents read us as children are all metaphors, almost always describing desirable behaviour. I remember my father telling me the ‘angry bee’ metaphor on several occasions as a kid. Once when I was losing a tennis match, and my temper, he said, ‘An angry bee stings, and dies. It was therefore better not to get angry’. (I later discovered it was a metaphor Seneca had used to try and persuade Nero that being a murdering pyromaniac would not be good for his legacy)
Metaphors can also be subtle uses of language that go largely unnoticed, but which can have a significant effect on the way we think about a situation. For example, ‘crime wave’ is an emotive term that may lead to someone reading the term conclude that there was more crime than if the numbers were simply stated. The latter lacks the drama and emotive impact of the former.
Similarly, President Reagans ‘war on crime’ drove a military type response to drugs that resulted in a huge increase in incarceration rates, but no reduction in the availability of drugs. The ‘war’ was won when the ‘enemy’ was stopped, while doing nothing to address the causes of them becoming enemies in the first place. (Americans seem to be very good at this sort of self- delusion)
There is a substantial body of academic evidence surrounding the proposition that the use of metaphors counts for much more than we would naturally assume.
A former client, an SME whose lifeblood was being able to get to the senior people in target businesses in a B2B environment, found themselves struggling.
Many of those he needed to speak to, build a relationship with, and persuade that his solution was one that could be deployed easily, were increasingly protected by personal assistants in various forms.
He referred to them as ‘gate-keepers’ which they were. Their job was to ensure as far as possible that their bosses time was not wasted, that distractions were minimised and that they only saw the most important things.
My clients product did not necessarily fall into the ‘must see’ category, and he was therefore often frustrated.
After several conversations, we changed the metaphor in his mental model of the PA as ‘gate-keepers’ to one where they were ‘enablers’. In other words, he took the view that his task was not to get to the MD through the gatekeeper, but to engage the gatekeeper and turn them into an ‘enabler’ and even an advocate for their product.
Once this approach was understood and implemented, the results were spectacular.
Consider for a moment the impact of the current usage of the words ‘War’ and ‘China’ in any political statement from proponents of the AUKUS submarine deal. The language and the resultant frame through which most will consider the merits of this project will be influenced by the usage of those two words. Had anyone in power used the term ‘industrial development catalyst’ or ‘nation building’ it would have significantly changed the nature of the ‘debate’ surrounding this decision.
Metaphors are a natural and very important component of our communication. We learn to understand them as children, using them automatically to communicate effectively.
What metaphors are you using in your communication?
