BusinessQuests - tailored advice and facilitation for business progress

The wise learn from other people's experience

"The wise learn from other people's mistakes and fools from their own." So goes an ancient proverb that some say was first written in Aramaic. As far as I'm concerned, I have been more often a fool than a wise person. That may be because I prefer experimentation to inertia, feeling that Randy Pausch was so right when he said in the Last Lecture that in life "experience is what you get when you you didn't get what you wanted". This post is about experience sharing and it was prompted by a visit to Genaro Bardy's recent post on a presentation made by Kevin Rose.

Few things are more valuable for entrepreneurs and venture investors than getting the account of some real-life experience, whether it speaks of "success" or "failure" is completely irrelevant so long as the content is genuine and the analysis honest. When speaking to customers during workshops, trainings or coaching sessions I often encourage them to examine cases of other entrepreneurs they might know. I also advise them to cut through the crap of accounts entrepreneurial successes and  failures:

• in the former crap is neat logical explanations of how the successful entrepreneurs identified and captured an opportunity (i.e. they knew what they were doing from day one, had a definite plan and eventually ended up exactly where they'd wanted to be) and 
• in the latter crap is justifications and excuses pertaining to everything but the entrepreneurs themselves (i.e. they did everything right but someone else messed everything up or the circumstances caused them to fail despite their "perfect" plan).

In this post, I'd like to comment a bit further on this matter of sharing experience and use a presentation made by Kevin Rose as an example of the practice of honest and factual sharing of experience gained through different entrepreneurial initiatives.

A sobering view on "cloud computing"

Ellison's public rant about "cloud computing" is a sobering reminder that sometimes efforts to simplify the communication on technical topics actually blurs the picture, creates confusion and makes us less rigorous than we should be in our quest to understand what innovations are coming, as well as where the technology of business and the business of technology are headed.

Open source house initiative

An interesting initiative. One wonders what impacts may result from it on the building industry and on industries like timber trading whose activity is closely related to housing. Ultimately it's quite possible for this Open Source House Project to make a measurable contribution to sustainability and environmental protection.

The facilitation boost for teamwork

A very interesting post was published recently in a blog dealing with the point of confluence of marketing and neuroscience. It shows that bringing an outsider in any team endeavor actually improves the performance of the team effort. The post focuses particularly on decisions made in team contexts and on problem solving. This is very much in line with the kind of experience I have with workshops organized for customers on specific issues they want to deal with. In most cases we end-up achieving significant progress in an amazingly short time and with work that feel effortless although it's actually very demanding. The following are the top factors of success in my opinion:

1. focus on a specific issue: each workshop has a very specific focus area and my job as facilitator is to make sure everybody remains focused on the issue at hand or jointly agree to tackle another issue, but the point is to guarantee everybody is on the same page and all decisions about the topic to handle are made explicitly not by the usual "agenda drift" many meetings have
2. supporting process: during a workshop there is always a "backbone" in the form of a process that we follow and that process comprises specific sequences of work involving techniques borrowed from The Fifth Discipline, IDEO's method cards, NLP or Edward De Bono's Six Thinking Hats
3. external facilitation: as an outsider I have considerable freedom to ask stupid questions and approach the issues under discussion from original angles something perhaps an insider might not dare do or think doing as it's not easy to escape from established ways of doing inside an organization

So the effect of external facilitation seems to be visible in scientifically controlled experiments, something I find really interesting. The article clearly states that you don't need to bring in expensive consultants to get the "outsider effect" and that's rather good news because it's a great argument for enlightened entrepreneurs and managers who want to mix people from different functional areas. Now I believe there is much more to it than "just" importing an outsider in a team process if we want maximum impact. The effect is most likely much greater if the outsider has developed an expertise in this type of services.

Power of time-off

Some interesting inspiration at a time when it's so "normal" to always be reachable and connected and active and "oh-my-Gosh" so busy...

Slides from the conference at Technoport

A mini-conference about the basics of how to use search marketing to develop the business was organized today at Technoport with eTeamsys and BusinessQuests presenting.

Mike Mitchell, eTeamsys' CEO, spoke about the challenges and the major trends affecting search marketing, with a highlight on e-reputation. When speaking about e-reputation he showed how search results about Clearstream are currently affected by a high-profile trial that took place in France recently and by video content making a number of negative claims about the Luxembourg-based player in securities clearing & settlement. By contrast, Mike showed how search results about Euroclear were consistent with a more desirable image for such a player. That was pretty interesting and I certainly recommend you look at the slides with evidence of the difference between the search results of these two players. Now you might ask what the impact may be since these are B2B players and their business is unlikely to be affected by that kind of results as industry insiders will filter out the noise. Well, it may well affect the ability of the organization to recruit talent (remember how people became uncomfortable saying they were working for Philip Morris a few years ago or how people working for virtually bankrupt investment banks were being very discreet about that last year?). And since there is a war for talent and these organizations do need good IT people, there may be an impact. At any rate I'm not sure you want your brand to be tarnished even if that can boost your PageRank, right?

I spoke for BusinessQuests to highlight:

• the imperative of aligning online strategy to overall business strategy
• the scarcity of human attention, 
• how to consider people when publishing content online, especially when you want your ads to get clicked and to lead to actual commercial results
• the need to think in terms of audience, experience and influence when defining your approach to search and more largely your online presence
• what can be done in the field of analytics in terms of audience profiling, content performance and ultimately business performance 

The two sets of slides are to be found below.

eTeamsys on search marketing

BQ on objectives driven online presence

Slides from the conference at Technoport

A mini-conference about the basics of how to use search marketing to develop the business was organized today at Technoport with eTeamsys and BusinessQuests presenting.

Mike Mitchell, eTeamsys' CEO, spoke about the challenges and the major trends affecting search marketing, with a highlight on e-reputation. When speaking about e-reputation he showed how search results about Clearstream are currently affected by a high-profile trial that took place in France recently and by video content making a number of negative claims about the Luxembourg-based player in securities clearing & settlement. By contrast, Mike showed how search results about Euroclear were consistent with a more desirable image for such a player. That was pretty interesting and I certainly recommend you look at the slides with evidence of the difference between the search results of these two players. Now you might ask what the impact may be since these are B2B players and their business is unlikely to be affected by that kind of results as industry insiders will filter out the noise. Well, it may well affect the ability of the organization to recruit talent (remember how people became uncomfortable saying they were working for Philip Morris a few years ago or how people working for virtually bankrupt investment banks were being very discreet about that last year?). And since there is a war for talent and these organizations do need good IT people, there may be an impact. At any rate I'm not sure you want your brand to be tarnished even if that can boost your PageRank, right?

I spoke for BusinessQuests to highlight:

• the imperative of aligning online strategy to overall business strategy
• the scarcity of human attention, 
• how to consider people when publishing content online, especially when you want your ads to get clicked and to lead to actual commercial results
• the need to think in terms of audience, experience and influence when defining your approach to search and more largely your online presence
• what can be done in the field of analytics in terms of audience profiling, content performance and ultimately business performance 

The two sets of slides are to be found below.

eTeamsys presentation on search marketing

BusinessQuests presentation on online marketing for real people