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Are you what you do?

A fairly mundane debate sparked by a comment I made on Twitter about the (pathetic) "Gmail Man" campaign launched by Microsoft led to unexpected territory: philosophy about what defines identity.

One of my friends and partners, Fabian Tilmant, a Google hater, Apple zealot and Tech skeptic, who is currently working on a book outlining DICoDE a model aimed at decoding and reinventing content businesses, said something like "you are what you do". His claim came from the fact that I said Google has a weakness in the way most people perceive them as a company, replying to Fabian's opinion that Google is "increasingly perceived as an ad company". For the record I disagree with that statement and I'm looking for data about how Google is perceived, but I suspect people know the search engine, the billions made selling ad space and the issues with street view. Not too sure they'd spontaneously say "Oh yes! Google, the ad company"... Most people don't have a clue about things like AdWords, AdSense, the display network or retargeting... and even if they did, it's not an "ad company", whatever that may be.

Anyhow, are you what you do? Is a business what they do? Fabian thinks so and says "Public Opinion don't know vision/mission. They only see/feel/experiment touch points." He is quite right, but that does not mean that what consumers experiment is the core of a brand's or company's identity: it is the perception of the people. It is also the definition of the company in the consumer's mind. But it is not identity. Identity is something that is difficult to grasp most of the time, which is why we often use metaphor to define or convey it. Identity is on the inside, not defined by someone else's perception of a person, company or brand. Granted, identity, mission, vision all have important influence on the kind of goals and strategies a company can pursue. In turn strategies have an influence on the activities of a company, including products, services and cultural patterns of behavior, all of which impact market perception. But again someone else's perception of you is not your identity, no more than your clothes are part of your organism.

So in my opinion in order to succeed, particularly with Google Apps - an amazing platform that gives businesses of all sizes the IT firepower they could never hope to have paying for armies of sys admins to run the incumbent's products -, Google needs to fix the way it's perceived because much of what many people know of Google tends to make it possible for older incumbents like Microsoft to try to exploit fear and imply (falsely or at least without any proof at all) that people's and businesses' emails are "read" by Google, much like your postman would open your good old paper envelopes. And of course we know that Microsoft is not alone using fear tactics or trying to hit Google's reputation using questionable means. Their good friends at Facebook have been caught paying a PR company of questionable ethical standards to slander Google.

So, no you are not what you do: identity and image are not the same thing at all.

Collateral damage in tech products

I found this very interesting quote today:

So, for good and for bad, I believe Blackberry is attached at the hip to Exchange. As Microsoft loses share to Google in the enterprise, something I believe is bound to happen, Blackberry will lose share to Android as well. Wil and I are cases in point.avc.com, A VC, Jan 2010

Aside from the fact that it does make a very valid point on the tight coupling between Exchange Server and Blackberry technologies, therefore about the likely evolution of RIM's market share as Google increases its share of the smartphone and mail server markets, this post reminded me of a thought I've had a number of times over the past few weeks. It deals with collateral damage. Collateral damage in technology products and their adoption that is.

In 2009 I decided to try Chrome as a browser. Initially it was just this: a trial. The point of fact is that 9 or 10 months later, I'm still browing the web on Chrome. For some reason, Google's browser was "sticky" enough for me to make it my main browser, even though for the first couple of weeks I missed some of the functionality provided by Firefox add-ons like Zotero, WiseStamp for HTML signatures with my email on Google Apps, ColorZilla, add-ons with web developer tools, enhanced analytics via a GreaseMonkey based add-on... and a couple of others. These add-ons are what I call collateral damage, because my intention was not to stop using them, but because they were tightly coupled with a platform product that I ditched for a better one, they went down the drain too and I adopted other ways of doing the things that these add-ons were designed to do. Collateral damage.

In practical terms, if you're in a role of product manager / product owner, this means that:

1. you need a constantly updated picture of the entire ecosystem of your company and its products, which means that market, product, competitor and tech watch are of paramount importance today more than ever before.
2. the focus should be on new users as well as users you are loosing, as the former give you a fresh perspective and a fairly accurate picture of the image your business has on the market and the latter give you insights into what you could do (much) better. Both will tell you how you're doing against the competition or rather in the coopetition ecosystem of your business.
3. your job is to cover market situation, competitive game, (potential) customer contacts (daily as Loic Le Meur was saying in a recent interview), product vision, product roadmap / phasing, product development priorities (as in prioritized backlog of user stories)

Exciting times! And by the way, do read all of Fred Wilson's post.

PS: I just love the way the Zemanta editor generates in-text links obviously doing some seriously good work in analyzing my babble. What I dislike is that Zemanta does not allow me to define the title of the post on my blog and does not support my defining categories for the re-blogging I'm doing.

Chambers making the case for business (re)invention

You've got to love the way Chambers has been managing Cisco for the past couple of decades and also how he took the lessons of the IBM story doing a hell of a lot to permanently sharpen strategic thinking and execution. He states very clearly why a company cannot afford to miss a major market transition, which means that a company cannot possibly afford not to monitor, analyze, measure, discuss and decide on changes in its environment, something far too many companies actually do *not* do. Better watch this sequence of his interview.

Planet Google?

Just read a piece about where Google might be in ten years and considering the success of Gmail between 2004 and now, the author might just be right even though his forecasts may seem wild at times (e.g. Android prevailing in the mobile OS wars). That gives me an opportunity to comment and discuss a bit further Google's amazing ability to execute beautifully a bold strategy of massive innovation to deliver on an audacious vision to organize the world's information.

The science of motivation

Daniel Pink makes once again a great case for non-conventional thinking on the topic of the drivers of motivation. He debunks a number of assumptions that most of us take for granted just because we grew up in a world driven by the fallacy of rationality of economic agents, "carrot and stick" or "reward - punishment" paradigm. Pink shows how reward schemes actually force people to narrow their thinking down to obvious paths and therefore are mostly counter productive when it comes to really challenging situations, which is where rewards would be completely justified...

Perhaps an additional proof, if there was need for one, that money does not buy motivation, talent and ability to apply knowledge. There has to be something else. Something the builders of cathedrals in Europe knew centuries back when they were not only looking for capable craftsmen, but also looking for craftsmen that had a personal win in the success of the project to build a cathedral. And in a way Pink rediscovers and refines that by identifying three key aspects to motivation:

1. autonomy
2. mastery
3. purpose

Those who've been involved in neurolinguistic programming might say that these are key values and beliefs for reaching excellence of impeccability because they define aspects of the transpersonal level in Bateson's logical levels and they drive acquisition of skills (strategies), ways of doing (skills + behaviors) and ways of being (attitude, intention). There are some excellent examples here amongst which why Encarta lost to Wikipedia.

Furthermore Pink's points are highly compatible with the attributes of Resonant Leadership as discussed by Boyatzis & McKee.

Just watch a fascinating presentation:

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.

P&G lead by example in engaging constructively: Ariel's facts and figures

Recently I posted some thoughts based on a case study that questioned the practices of P&G which stood accused of trying to fool customers by falsely stating that the new bottle type of Ariel contained "10% more product" (tan the previous type of bottle presumably). 

Much to my surprise, I got an answer from somebody working for P&G who reacted within just a couple of hours and that's quite impressive since this blog has never been about building audience or making noise and is therefore not particularly influential. I'm absolutely WOWed by P&G ability to monitor online resources and take reasonable action on any alerts and that's the kind of defensive marketing tactics modern brand management should always feature. More often than not that's not the case.

In this post there's a quick analysis of the facts provided by P&G, which infirm the assertions of the presentation although they do not necessarily prove the accuracy of the "+10%" claim, which I'd rate as "almost true" or "true enough" if I were to run the "truth-o-meter". Naturally that means there is no reason to state that P&G is fooling their customers and the very fact that they engaged in a discussion with this blog shows that they're treating online sources and people out there in a very respectful manner.

Coherence essential to leveraging "social media"

Today I spent some time going through the "WTF is social media - one year later" presentation, which I find excellent. It's embedded below for your convenience and below are some of my thoughts on the matter.

What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later

View more documents from Jacquelyn Corbett cyr.

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The WTF material is really good stuff full of common sense, good thinking and it provides a sobering view of what this thing called social media could be used for. Focusing on fundamentals of business and on phenomena we've been able to observe over the past few months and years, the authors actually help business people who are a bit lost with all the chatter about social media and collaborative workspace. Observations and statements of what "social media" (for lack of a better word) could be used for are excellent and it's a pitty there is only little content about concrete ways in which to leverage the different aspects of social media... but of course who wouldn't understand that the authors would gladly provide that as part of their services at Brand Infiltration ;)

Now the presentation is also excellent food for thought and here are a couple of those that emerged going through the slides:

1. I am not entirely sure the method you use is what drives business value: I mean that whether you go for high tech "social online super dooper media"  or low tech "true caring for customers" the method will not built rapport let alone create a "mystique" for your brand. Look at Cirque du Soleil and how they went from a "spectacle de rue" in Québec to an amazing global business running over 15 shows on all continents and generating over 700 million USD in turnover by creating unique, magical, immersive and truly memorable experiences for their customers. Did they need social media to do that?
2. this whole issue of genuine engagement of prospects and customers starts within and that modern tools and practices simply make an organization more transparent and more porous therefore exposing both what is coherent and beautiful about its way of dealing with customers and what is slightly less desirable which could be hidden from view in the old world. From that perspective tackling brand building, community management, customer acquisition and engagement or even intelligence gathering simply from the angle of tools and practices is futile. You need to achieve deeper transformation of cultures and that's quite another challenge that requires capabilities and authority no CMO has on her own today. It takes the whole corporate leadership team to commit to a radically different way of running the business... And I don't think it's about unleashing complete chaos but rather about combining opposites, transcending old discipline and including it in new forms of managerial practices, pretty much like the Obama presidential campaign did: central control of all mission critical aspects and complete delegation of authority for everything else, taking care to project an image of collaboration & participation.
3. the mere fact that spending time on social media is one of the favorite online activities of Internet users today is not enough to demonstrate that from a business perspective you can actually do something useful in that space at an economically acceptable cost. It might only be a biased observation but, it does seem to me that:

• people gladly engage when there's a worthy cause for which there could not possibly be the slightest suspicion of commercial manipulation or commercial
• the rejection of initiatives that seem to be "remote-controlled" by major brands is almost immediate in many cases
• when a space is new like for example the blogosphere a few years ago or Twitter a couple of months ago, the signal / noise ratio is good enough to derive value out of that space with spectacular returns on investment whereas things become much more difficult when more people bring more content and more potential interactions
• the possibility of interactions does not means that there will be interactions, let alone true conversations where people actually listen to other people and truly seek to understand what they mean by what they say, an effort that requires focus of attention and that can be tedious enough to require far more time than is allowed by the culture of the immediate, fast and short of social media
• interactions don't mean transactions let alone economically useful or even profitable transactions

So social media is probably an excellent phenomenon for specific businesses and for a whole range of purposes and not only marcoms as rightly pointed out by the authors of the presentation... But it's only a tool and as such it's only as good and relevant as the skill with which it's applied to the pursuit of coherent objectives by congruent organizations who will make more than half-hearted committments to the new world of open participation. And that may not be a world for everyone, so expect to see more established organizations die as their environment changes to the point of transforming some long established practices into deadly sins.

Just words...

Business has a jargon like every field of human activity. But business has something else: a unique ability to distort and pervert words. In fact there are a few words that simply drive me nuts when I speak to customers and partners simply because they are often either meaningless or covering up realities we don't like to admit:

• strategic - often used to speak about initiatives that are risky and not supported by plans and actions to manage risk and help achieve intended business benefits... which also go unstated when (top) managers or entrepreneurs say something is "strategic"
• partnership - used to describe unspecified relationships between business entities all of which seek specific resources or benefits that none of the "partners" is able or immediately willing to provide, so we patch together a statement about a "partnership" just to stay positive
• synergies - perhaps one of the most beautiful words especially in a context of scarce environmental resources, but perhaps also the most perverted of words in business. Used to speak about (unspecified) justifications for putting together activities or combining assets. In fact it is a "cover up" word that sounds better than "lay-offs" or "discontinued operations" or "cost cutting". So more often than not the trigger to use "synergies" is fear to state intended business benefits especially if said benefits are achieved at the expense of people or local communities
• historic - a "historic" situation is a messy situation for which nobody has a better explanation but "it's always been done like that" and which nobody wants to incur the cost of reforming. So "historic" describes a mess we'd rather keep as is until somebody else gets the job and charge of it
• alliance - a slightly clearer situation than a partnership, but usually a reflection of the creation of a temporary situation until the relative situations of the allied parties evolve to the point of allowing one or more of them to clarify the alliance thing by acquiring the other parties. Here the use of the word is a reflection of the fear to alienate one or more parties whose competition we're better off avoiding
• integration - usually used in more technical contexts to speak about work to bring together the platforms" or tools of two organizations especially when the dominant organization is fearful of admitting publicly that their platform will end up replacing the one of the "weaker" party even irrespective of functional merit of said platform

So to sum it up:

• before doing something (often dumb) and not well thought through in terms of expected business benefits we call it "strategic"
• if we cannot access the assets we're looking for the move takes the form of the "partnership"
• and if the other party is a bit too strong to be swallowed we set up an "alliance"
• but once the dust has settled and we can simply acquire the other party, we start an "integration" program
• and, years down the line, when things go sour on a poorly designed move we call the situation "historic"

Of course since the average tenure of a CEO of a public company in the US is 18 months and people change jobs more and more often, parts of the economy become a big game of throwing the hot potato around... measured in GDP/capita of course.

US Innovation Status

I just read this excellent report on the status of innovation in the US (link kindly provided by the excellent Leeander) and I find it just amazing that the authors show a great deal of analytical rigor both in assessing the past and suggesting ways for the future in the form of a public private partnership. The article is long but very well worth your time.
With this kind of approach I see the US going back to the very top of innovation performance. It's time we did a similar assessment in Europe instead of just celebrating innovation and creativity in a very institutional manner.

MIT economists' panel sees light at end of economic tunnel

This is not only a good panel discussion, but also one that has some good news. The time might be close when people can resume investing. Perhaps it's also time for Europe to realize that our economic situation is way better than the US for a number of reasons starting with the fact that we are nowhere near the level of debt that prevails in the US be it government or private debt. It's just so sad we don't have anyone to carry the torch of recovery on the political front. As someone told me recently, a recession can be a self-fulfilling prophecy whereas business & economic progress does not happen by mere wishful thinking.

Vopium: does it rock?

I came across Vopium today and from what I read on their site and elsewhere online:

1. what they promise rocks, period and it's particularly relevant at this point in time with buyers being weary of spending too much
2. the offering stands to put even more pressure on mobile operators whose position is likely to be further undermined by VoIP plays like Skype (now running on some mobile phones) and Jajah. In fact, Jajah + Vopium spells the end of mobile operators' dominant position on the market of mobile connectivity;
3. it would be interesting to consider how Vopium could be combined to open WiFi networks in a logic analogous to Fon as it would definitely have some major appeal for roamers, even though GSM incumbents might not enjoy this that much :)

Anyway, I downloaded the software on my E61i. More in a few days.