As Seen In…
SandHill
Mission Clarity Cranks Performance “Up to Eleven”
March 24, 2010
Effective CEOs recognize that articulating a clear mission is an important part of their job. Yet, in my 20 years in Silicon Valley, including eight years of consulting with dozens of companies, I’ve sadly concluded that few CEOs do this really well. Part of the problem is that it’s hard to distill what’s needed for success in a complex technology-based business into a simple mission that can be understood throughout the organization. And few even know what they are missing.
Most companies have mission statements, many of which seem clear and concise, so why don’t more companies operate with clear missions in practice? Sometimes it’s because companies are living a lie and there is a mismatch between the culture and the mission, but usually it is because words alone don’t drive culture. The two most mission-driven organizations I’ve been part of didn’t have a written mission statement.
Read the rest of the article on Sandhill.com.
The original publication can be found at this link.
Tags: cornerstone, eleven, la fetra, mission clarity, mission statement, performance
Practice: Deliver
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The Pragmatic Marketer
Re-Inventing Product Management wtih LOVE
February 8, 2010
The critical role of the product manager is in the process of changing significantly, and both companies and product managers need to adapt. While product management is among the most critical roles in any company, it’s a role whose importance is under-heralded in most organizations. The extent and nature of the changes to the role mean that those that fail to re-invent themselves—or don’t try—are likely to find themselves displaced.
The original publication can be found at this link.
Tags: alignment, innovation, LOVE model, product management
Practice: Deliver
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ManageSmarter/Sales and Marketing Management
Open-source Lessons for Managing Your Company
December 9, 2009
New forms of communications currently are putting the squeeze on the hierarchical management structures used by most businesses today. Several useful lessons for management emerge from the open-source software experience where the limitations of the traditional model for software development and licensing led to the open-source revolution.
Open-source has revolutionized how software is developed and sold, delivering more options, better reliability, and lower costs. Wikipedia offers solid evidence that the open-source model extends successfully to other types of efforts, as well, with some companies even seeing benefits in open-source hardware. The mainstreaming of two-way communications such as blogs, wikis, and social media is enabling the next open-source opportunity: management.
The original publication can be found at this link.
Tags: La Fetra, management, open source, software
Practice: Deliver
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Forbes
Leaders Need To Be Collaborators Too: Why you shouldn’t be ”Chief of Answers.”
November 30, 2009
We all want to enable organizational velocity. We know that as we lead, we not only need to make right decisions ourselves, but we need to help our teams make good decisions as well. But how often do we step in, make the decision and then wonder why our team is not “engaged?”
Many a leader sees himself in this scenario: “Lucas,” a general manager at a major media services company, told me he wanted his team to step up and figure out how to tackle a huge growth opportunity for his business unit. He had the vague sense his people were somehow holding back. At the same time, he gave more specific direction than made sense, given the talent of the people reporting to him. Employees strive to understand the unwritten rules that their boss operates by. Lucas didn’t recognize how his actions signaled to the team that their ideas were not valued.
The original publication can be found at this link.
Tags: The New How
Practice: Deliver
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San Fransico Chronicle
More users offload laptop work to smart phones
November 8, 2009
Six months ago, Deborah Han’s laptop died.
Instead of replacing the old machine, the Walnut Creek city planner decided to buy an iPhone 3GS and see how long it would take before she was forced to get a laptop. Six months later, she still hasn’t made the purchase.
“I realized that a lot of things that my laptop does, my iPhone could also do,” said Han, 29. “It’s not as good as my laptop but my work and lifestyle don’t require me to look at my laptop that much.”
Han is part of a growing group of smart phone users who have shifted more of their computing workload to their mobile device. In most cases, smart phone users can’t completely ditch their computers, which are better for bigger tasks like creating documents, editing files and viewing media.
But the rise of the smart phone is reordering the way people compute, allowing people to tackle tasks like e-mailing, document viewing, social networking and light browsing from their handheld. In the process, it’s lessening some of the need for a laptop or desktop, both in the workplace and at home.
Processing power
Devices like the iPhone, BlackBerry and new Android devices pack in the processing power of small computers.
With 3G data access, Wi-Fi support and new full featured mobile browsers, users are able to enjoy a good rendering of a laptop Internet experience.
And with the explosion of mobile applications in the last year, smart phone users are able to rely on tailored programs that make certain tasks easier on a handheld than on a traditional computer.
Allen Nogee, an analyst with In-Stat said a recent survey of smart phone owners found that 35 percent of their data usage came in the home. He said that for many lighter tasks in the home, users are turning to the smart phone rather than booting up the desktop or laptop.
“If they want to browse the Internet or if they want to see a Web link they may pull out their phone and see that before walking over to the laptop,” Nogee said. “I think a lot of people are offloading a lot of those laptop tasks to the phone.”
A survey by Rubicon Consulting in March found that of respondents who were asked if they often carried their iPhone in place of a notebook, 28 percent of agreed strongly and 29 percent agreed mildly.
Bruce La Fetra, a business strategist for Rubicon said that while PCs will remain essential, the findings are a testament to the progress smart phones have made.
“There’s a lot more capabilities in smart phones that we hardly dreamed of a few years ago,” he said. “To be able to have a full, high-speed connection where you have the connectivity of being in the office in a small form factor, that’s a huge step up.”
For many workers, a smart phone allows them to keep their laptop at bay, while they handle many of their daily tasks.
Reaching for phones
Connie Kim Coutain, assistant director of media relations at Santa Clara University, said she has found herself using her laptop and desktop less now that she’s armed with both an iPhone and BlackBerry.
Even though she has five computers at home, including a small netbook, it’s her smart phones she reaches for first.
“I check both phones first thing in the morning and it’s the last thing I do before I go to bed,” she said “They’re glued to my hips.”
The growth of smart phones and their effect on traditional PC sales is still being measured. By most accounts, smart phones haven’t eaten into PC sales, said Richard Shim, an analyst with IDC.
He said PC sales have remained steady despite the economic downturn, in part because average selling prices have come down significantly.
Indeed, PC sales still far outnumber smart phones sales, according to IDC. In the third quarter, PC vendors moved 78 million computers compared to 43 million smart phones.
But smart phones are growing at a faster pace. IDC predicts smart phone sales will go from 151.6 million units in 2008 to 334.2 million units in 2013.
PCs still remain more capable devices that serve bigger needs. Ken Dulaney, an analyst with Gartner, said the small screens and keyboards of smart phones prevent users from doing real content creation.
He said even for document viewing, the small screen can be an issue. Gartner has advised its customers to read all their attachments on a PC because of concerns about clients overlooking information when viewing it on a smart phone screen.
Defined roles
He said increasingly the smart phone and PC will settle into more defined roles and will lead to an overall rise in the intensity of computing by users.
Cindi Cheney, owner of CJ Event Management, said her Mac is still essential for doing spreadsheets, preparing documents and doing heavy research. But on any given day, her BlackBerry Curve is her go-to device.
She said more than a year ago, when she had an assistant, she used to rely on her and her computer to correspond with clients. When the economy forced her to layoff her assistant, the BlackBerry took on a much bigger role.
While it handled about a quarter of her communications before, she now turns to it for 75 percent of her correspondence, even when she’s sitting in front of her computer.
“It just seems easier for some reason because it’s all right there,” Cheney said. “It reminds me I have appointments, what e-mail I have, any follow-ups I have to do. Basically, it’s an extension of my laptop but it’s more portable and easy.”
The original publication can be found at this link.
Tags: iphone, la fetra, smart phones
Practice: Define
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TEDIndia
Re-invention of Work
November 4, 2009
Usually at TED, people talk about success. I’m going to talk about why companies fail and specifically why the old rules — those that once made companies powerful — no longer work. The best way for me to do this is with 2 examples.
A company I was recently working with needed a new product manager to help pursue a market opportunity. I thought I knew the perfect guy, Anand, who had a background in founding several companies, knew mobile and the emerging space. So I was really surprised to hear the interview didn’t go well. What I heard back was that he was surely bright and capable, he “asked a ton of questions”, “challenged us on what we were doing” and was generally “in our face”. Yikes, I thought. So the interview team was saying, he just doesn’t fit.
And when they say he “didn’t fit”, what they were really saying was that he didn’t fit into their box they had defined. And that’s quite often how we think of success — the big campus, the reporting structure in the hierarchy, and the title the person would have.
But those boxes — they don’t help us to achieve success. Sure, they help us define what each person does. But as soon as we are thinking of boxes, what we also get is the space between the boxes. Those gaps — those spaces in between the boxes — they are where organizations fail. It’s the lack of connection across a company or a silo-ed approach to going in a new direction that quite often causes failure. Roles matter, but what matters more going forward is how those roles interact.
Another company I was working with needed to reinvent their core business. They needed to find and win a new market and they needed to do it fast. They brought together their top executives, gathered some forward thinking market research, gathered insights, formed a new direction and quite frankly imaged a new direction that was KILLER. They got all the “what” right. What they missed was the how. They now had a great idea really known by the top of the organization and then TOLD to the people to execute. So rather than getting results, what they got was an “Air Sandwich” — all the meaty things were missing. On a practical level, by not involving the people who could make a new direction a reality, they didn’t enable the 100 or 1000 small decisions that needed to be made. The air sandwich was created because the entire organization hadn’t made the necessary tradeoffs, and developed a shared vision of success.
Which reminds me of a concept in physics. It’s called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. It says that you can either focus on momentum or position, but not both. And it strikes me that Company B was too focused on a fixed point in time — the strategy in this case — and neglected to do the how in such a way that the vision became a reality.
This focus on the What or on the top of the organization setting direction for the company — this is an artifact of the past. It’s what we did when we didn’t have a highly educated, creative workforce. It’s what we did when information didn’t flow freely and we needed to tell people what to do. It is a relic of the time when markets and competitors moved more slowly.
A company focused on momentum focuses on how to create action. It acts more like a living, breathing organism that can take in information from the market, knows what questions to ask and answer, can envision many options to success, can decide amongst all those option quickly and can take the vision into reality. Momentum then keeps up with or sets the pace for the competition. Momentum allows us to act flat rather than wait to pass information up and down the hierarchy of an organization.
What this feels like inside the organization is a move from “I think, You do” to “We think, we win”. It allows people to contribute their ideas, to debate options, to be co-creators in a shared outcome. And work becomes a place where every light of every person shines more brightly because we’re engaged.
Which brings me back to the story of Anand. The team needed to recast their perspective on his questions and realize while did ask many questions, he wasn’t focused on his person success but on how the company would be successful. And once they could see this new angle on his approach, they could see that he was interested, engaged, and creative. They did hire him and today he chairs their Innovation Council which is their vehicle for figuring out which opportunities to pursue and what products to build. But this story is not just about Anand. But about the energy and creative force Anand represents for his firm. He along with his colleagues are collaboratively working, just as we all can.
The time has come for us to look at the way we conceive of success. We can continue the focus on bigness rather than action, having the “right” people participate rather than letting the merit of ideas come from anywhere and engaging everywhere in the organization. And when we do this — we’ll have a new how. We’ll create growing organizations that are creative, vibrant, resilient organizations that can win and win repeatedly.
Tags: anand, Nilofer, reinvention, TED
Practice: Define
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Future Salon
Future Salon
September 14, 2009
How do you best run your company with the new realities of collaboration and co-creation?
Tags: future salon, nilofer
Practice: Define
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SandHill
Using LOVE to Be Lean and Mean
July 24, 2009
If a competitor made a concerted effort to come after your market, how would your customers react? What can you do to build the type of bonds that survive-or even thrive-in tough times? The Lifetime Value Opportunity Equation (LOVE model) provides CEOs an actionable framework for using consumer relationships to make your organization more competitive (and efficient and innovative).
Most organizations-probably yours too-define customer relationships in terms of the buying funnel: awareness, consideration, and purchase. The buying funnel is predicated on your company controlling the message, but this no longer works in an environment dominated by two-way and unstructured communications such as blogs, user-generated reviews and comments, and social media networks. It’s now easy for your customers to talk back-or to each other-via conversations that are beyond your control.
The key is interacting with consumers rather than transacting with them. CEOs lack a framework for understanding how to interact with consumers as they evolve through the different stages of relationship. (Newsflash: not all consumers are the same.) You need to stop trying to bribe and manipulate people to get them to do what you want. This is transactional behavior that doesn’t encourage you-or them-to seek new forms of value. Deeply engaged customers buy from a company not merely because they like the product or service, but because they genuinely want the business to be successful.
The LOVE model departs from the buying funnel by viewing consumer relationships as an evolving set of bi-directional interactions. These relationships grow from an introductory stage where neither party knows much about the other all the way to co-creation. In a co-creative relationship, you and your customers share a common vision and align interests. The benefits of co-creation are huge, and reach into every corner of your business and are reflected in both top line revenue and bottom line costs.
The LOVE model can be applied to any online relationship, not just to customer acquisition and purchase. Likewise, the benefits of the LOVE model framework extend far beyond social media and other marketing campaigns making it of particular value to CEOs seeking to drive change throughout their organizations. The LOVE model drives long-term value in areas as diverse as customer support, product development, and thought leadership.
The value of making your business success a shared goal draws customers closer to your company in ways that a transactional outlook simply cannot. Embracing the LOVE model framework embarks your organization on a journey of discovery which leads to quantifiable results, long-term value, and enhanced competitiveness.
The original publication can be found at this link.
Tags: buying funnel, consumer, la fetra, lafetra, LOVE, relationships
Practice: Define
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Five Rules of Thumb for Social Media Advertising
July 22, 2009
This article from Sprout CEO Carnet Williams makes a nice mention of Rubicon’s LOVE Model for understanding consumer - company relationships.
The original publication can be found at this link.
Tags: la fetra, lafetra, LOVE, relationships, social media, sprout
Practice: Define
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Social Media Summit - Filling Your Company with LOVE
June 30, 2009
As companies see increasing value in social media campaigns, it is becoming apparent that the transactional-centric models currently used for tracking and measuring marketing campaigns are not up to the social media challenge. With social media campaigns often focused on brand building and driving engagement, the tools used to measure the impact on sales and brand are ill-suited to accurately measuring the full impact and value of social media campaigns.
The buying or sales funnel that has served marketers well for many years no longer works in an environment now centered on two-way and unstructured communications. A new framework developed at Rubicon Consulting, Inc. offers the relationship-centric LOVE model as a replacement—and enhancement—for the transaction-based buying funnel.
Practice: Define
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