Business Quests in the Information Age

Inspiration from The Last Lecture

Today's inspiration from me. Dr Pausch's presentation contains a message for those of my customers who complain when I tell them what they need to know instead of what they'd like to hear: "your critics are the ones telling you they love you and care... when you're doing a bad job and nobody points it out to you, that's when they've given up on you". Enjoy.

The full lecture given at Carnegie Mellon University is below. Be sure to take the hour and a quarter needed to watch it because it's worth it. Every slice of it.

Lego Mindstorms at Ad:Tech

Just attended a splendid presentation of the way Lego has been actively seeking to and succeeding in involving passionate users in the life of the Mindstorms product line. Lego's people noticed that Mindstorms was generating a lot of passionate contributions and involvement by the community of users, many of whom were absolutely not kids but male adults. The product seems to have been outrageously successful in the Silicon Valley, where the local tech enthusiasts seem to be the typical customers. The product was being hacked and transformed in all sorts of ways... So Lego's people decided to really engage in a very intense interaction with their customers and to let them influence the life of the product to a very large degree. They set a few very simple rules to manage the community of carefully screened engaged users: respect, positive contribution and giving Lego a veto right on how the product would evolve... Today, it's one of the best known examples of how powerful a genuine engagement with customers can be to drive buzz, word of mouth and basically to make it possible for a lovemark to emerge. There's even the case of famous author Chris Anderson who went on to build a drone using a Mindstorms NXT control module...
Here's a nice little video about Mindstorms:

Carbon emissions: facts to make a difference

Nowadays a day seldom goes by without some piece of news regarding the sorry state and dismal prospects of the Earth's environment. These are the days of inconvenient truths. Opinions are numerous, conceptual ideas abound,  more or less scientific and rigorous conclusions widely distributed and each person responds in their own way. Some will feel anxious, others don't know or pretend not to know (so they can drive an over-sized car with an engine that makes a noise that is music to their ears), others still feel a century is too long a time to worry and a few do what they can to help.
The point however is that we all seem to be like drivers or airplane pilots deprived of instruments, flying or driving blindly in the worrying knowledge that the wall we will hit is getting dangerously close. That's the key issue: we lack data about the impact of our daily micro-decisions on the environment even though there are all sorts of calculators of environmental impact out there. What we do not have is a means to measure what is going on as it's happening, which is really a pity in a world so connected. That's precisely one of the challenges OpenSpime, the self proclaimed "infrastructure company for an open internet of things", seems to be addressing with a pretty cool infrastructure that combines sensors, software, the Internet and mashups to deliver actual maps of carbon dioxide emissions. A good friend of mine is their CTO and I am impressed with what these guys are presenting in this video:

Great User Generated Content in the US Primaries

Here's a piece I think is a shining example of user generated content and a strong indication that open online platforms give real power and influence to the people. Now sure whether that validates Gladwell's tipping point, but it does show that the people can wield some influence. Now the question is whether this influence will be stronger than that of insiders of a system, in this case the US political establishment. Something interesting to watch for marketeers and communication pros.

Matthieu Ricard at Google

Interesting insights with a strong scientific and philosophical basis. Also interesting is the fact that Ricard was invited to speak at Google. What would happen in the economy if we had truly happy people at work? What would the impact be on our societies and on global issues facing mankind?

Impressions from Ad:Tech London

This is a short interview given by Emmanuel Vivier, one of the founders of Vanksen Group (a customer I advise in matters of strategy, growth management, organization, structuring and corporate governance) at Ad:Tech in London. Emmanuel gives some pretty interesting assessments of the readiness of the market for new marketing approaches. It does seem that marketing decision makers are increasingly aware and willing to deploy integrated online-offline campaigns and to exploit capabilities of the Information Age for communicating. However, there are quite a few new challenges that they may not be familiar with, starting with the issues of brand management and brand protection in an open environment like the Internet. And since we are getting closer to 15-OCT (blog action day), I will simply put out the questions: how relevant is it to be marketing in ever cleverer ways if that does not contribute to better consumption instead of merely more consumption? how can new marketing support more sustainable economic models that do not require more natural resources than can be afforded by the one planet we have? Probably something to be considered as part of strategy formulation at Vanksen Group.

The luxury of "inexpensive"

Going for the inexpensive way of doing things may be a costly option. In fact, inexpensive may be a luxury your business cannot afford. What prompts these lines is a discussion I had this morning with the managing director of a start-up I first met a year ago. Back then the company was in crisis both because one of the founders was about to quit and because there were no business priorities. At least that was my assessment and it was not to the liking of the entrepreneurs. A year later, the company is about to file for bankruptcy and I had a chat with its MD to understand what had happened. Much of the ills of the operation came from its incoherent development strategy and from a less than realistic way of allocating available resources. As an example, I will simply mention the fact that the company attempted to develop markets that were several thousand kilometers aways from its HQ, when all it had was a few thousand Euros of equity and less than 3 FTEs as personnel. Of course, there are many causes for the sorry situation in which that business finds itself today, but what struck me in my chat was a statement made by its MD as he gave be a brief summary of the past 12 months and I quote: "we hired a commercial director basically because he was not too expensive, but he turned out to be a biz dev guy rather than a real sales person". Sometimes, especially when it comes to choosing personnel, the real cost of choosing the candidate who appears to be the most inexpensive is simply too big to bear. Inexpensive is a luxury that no business can afford for mission critical positions. That may be the saddest lesson to be taken from this case and there is also a confirmation: talent is the most critical ingredient of business success, no matter what. However, for talent to have an impact the organization must be able to configure itself so as to assign talent to topics matching real competence and sometimes founders just should not be leading the organization. MD is not an easy job and not a job that should serve as a way for someone to enhance their social position of the perception people may have of them. That's just serving the ego.

Inexpensive is luxury...

The Paradox of Choice

Perhaps an interesting perspective to consider in the way we run business and countries.

How good are we at pursuing happiness?

A fascinating presentation at TED Talks about our ability to "synthesize" happiness. Of course, as is often the case with results from scientific research, this can be seen in a positive light (that we can synthesize happiness better than we can pursue it) or in a way that would essentially anihilate the drive for progress (why pursue happiness if it can be synthesized?).

Kiva's Great Business Quest

As ever when doing my research on the web, trying to find out what's new (and relevant for me), I have hard time saying how I "discover" interesting stuff. So, I cannot tell you how I found Kiva, but I can tell you that after some research on that organization I am totally fascinated by the greatness of its mission, using the global reach of tools of the Information Age to bridge gaps, facilitate economic development and change lives. However, this is far from being YAC (yet another charity)

Kiva operates a site that essentially offers all now standard  e-commerce functionality to let you choose to lend to specific businesses which need fairly reasonable amounts of money (at least by the standards of so-called developed countries). The cases are presented in a very summarized way and micro-credit organizations or NGOs will take care of qualifying the borrower and following the use of funds with Kiva's help, which in turn means that the lender (you) will get her money back most of the time.
Now, this goes well beyond charity: it's a real instrument of development (although I am not sure all of those little businesses respect the requirements of durable development - maybe the next frontier). I just love the idea that in this deal it's not about giving money to people, it's not about subsidizing poverty; rather, it's about giving a helping hand to people who do want to build their business and increase their prosperity in a lasting manner. I just love the idea that we are **not** "buying" their silence and acceptance of a lesser condition and unfair use of global resources like so many relief programs do; we are not buying their dignity, but instead facilitating their own personal quests. So Kiva's is not the simple quest of a bunch of generous souls in the US, it is the compounded business quests of all the little entrepreneurs in remote places of the planet who will do better in a matter of 6-36 months simply because some people decide to postpone an expense of as little as 25 € for that same period of time.

So you my dear reader, if you can afford to postpone one or more of your expenses by a couple of months, please do visit Kiva's website and consider it as a great way to share the luck you and I received at birth with people who have an equal right as we have to pursue their quests and dreams.

Here are a few comments from traditional media (it's so funny that the BBC still thinks in terms of national borders which is meaningless most of the time when it comes to the beautiful global reality of the Internet):

'Revolutionising how donors and lenders in the US are connecting with small entrepreneurs in developing countries.'
-- BBC

'If you've got 25 bucks, a PC and a PayPal account, you've now got the wherewithal to be an international financier.'
-- CNN Money

'Smaller investors can make loans of as little as $25 to specific individual entrepreneurs through a service launched last fall by Kiva.org.'
-- The Wall Street Journal

'An inexpensive feel-good investment opportunity...All loaned funds go directly to the applicants, and most loans are repaid in full.'
-- Entrepreneur Magazine