Business Quests in the Information Age

Great insights from Kevin Roberts

Here's a great interview from Kevin Roberts' the iconic CEO of Saatchi& Saatchi and influential creator of the concept of lovemark. Roberts' intelligent insights show that established agencies have caught up on the core issues of today's marketing and communications, something that will increasingly be a true competitive challenge to the new palyers who emerged during the past 5-8 years. In fact, these new players emerged as a result of radical change in the business environment and for many of them success was predicated on their ability to get to the future first. That was easy because they had no legacy practices, but that is no longer the case and hence their survival is entirely dependent on their ability to reach critical mass or to remain on the "bleeding edge" of innovation in marketing and communications.

Some highlights:

• consumer is king and an empowered one, which has led to a dramatic shift in the power balance between brands and consumers. To me that echoes my belief in the primacy of people in business, one of the central tenets of Business Quests' approach.
• there are three critical dimensions to lovemarks, none of which is discussed in MBA programs as Roberts correctly points out: mystery, sensuality and intimacy
• agencies need to move closer to consumers on an individual basis rather than in the traditional "mass market" kind of way. In doing that they will need to combine "right brain" and "left brain" thinking: analytical insight into the ways individuals "operate" and creative foresight to actually understand the consumer's behavior. "If you want to know about lions you have to go to the jungle, not to the zoo", says Roberts;
• we are in the screen age: people spend an incredible proportion in front of screens that are increasingly networked, interactive and mobile;
• 85% of consumer decisions are made in store and in an age when differences in product quality is less and less significant the emotional connection between an individual and a brand will actually tilt the balance of consumer decisions;
• "it's all about getting to the future first".

Roberts' also made a point about access to information and knowledge no longer being limited to the chosen few and therefore access alone is not a competitive edge as it used to be. To me, this means that the life of service providers like big name consulting companies, well-known agencies and other advisors has become considerably more complex. Their success hinges more on how they'll use knowledge rather than on how much access they have to it. That does create an interesting world.

Kick starting product management with scrum

The recent training on scrum has been an interesting inspiration for me. Even more importantly, it opened up new perspectives on the best way to carry out product management work and provided a framework that helps me understand a bit better things that went particularly well in past projects and by contrast why other projects were such drags.

Thinking about the pains of getting customers to feel happy with a product, I realized that product management is one of the most critical areas that is broken in many companies. In fact in many cases it's stalled and needs kick starting. So, I structured a workshop using scrum artifacts to run it in combination with other tools and disciplines. The purpose is to have participants exposed to scrum artifacts while working to get product management moving again so as to create a positive exposure and to generate motivation to use scrum once product development is reorganized to be agile. In the workshop there is a short introduction to scrum focusing mainly on the way scrum works rather than on the origins and history of it and to run that section of the workshop the excellent introduction slides by Black Marble will be used.

The structure of the workshop is in the following slides. Feel free to use this stuff: it's under BY-SA-NC Creative Commons license... In fact, I will likely run such a workshop pretty soon in one of my projects, but given the nature of the exercise I won't disclose anything about it and it will be yet another situation about which blogging is not an option... Anyway, I hope this will be useful to you and as ever I am really eager to get some feedback about this stuff, especially if there are "stories from the field" :-)

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Done!

Well, I guess it's done in the fullest sense of the word: the scrum master training is over and it's been an exciting couple of days with Jeff Sutherland and great participants. There was theory, there were facts (many) and there was also practice, where I got an opportunity to play with nice fun people like Nicolas and to benefit from the creative ideas of Denis, two team mates in a practice sequence that we blew away. One of the missions was to build a four story house of cards (that's where Denis creative use of post-its came in). Great fun. Here are the pictures.

The team's achievement (OK, the fourth level of the house is minimalistic, but on the other hand that was the description of the requirement in the story point, so why go beyond and take the risk of send everything crumbling down?) with Denis trying to hide behind a bottle of water ;-)

Nicolas, who's given us a great tip to properly achieve estimates: make sure you are absolutely clear about what "done" means... and that makes a world of difference both in terms of quality of estimates and in terms of making the interaction between team members really productive and uplifting:

The team's achievement with Laurent at the right hand side in the background. Laurent works for CRP Henri Tudor, Luxembourg's public research center, which means that Luxembourg had some serious proportion of the audience in this session of scrum master (there were 4 people from Vanksen Group, Laurent and myself - I count at least 50% from Luxembourg given the amount of time I spend there!).

Upgrading my "software"

One of the things that I most love about being a freelance professional is the freedom to choose how I go about upgrading my skills, the software that I have installed between my ears if you will. In fact, following trainings that can help me better coach and help my customers is a priority. That's one criterion for choosing and that's what led me to participate to a two-day training session organized by Xebia with Jeff Sutherland (who I find very impressive with his great combination of expertise, experience and common sense - highly recommended!) on scrum a method that he's helped invent. Scrum does seem to be the kind of methodology that truly binds agile practices of software development teams to agile product management, i.e.exactly what one needs to help customers in fast paced and high-growth business contexts. For more about Scrum this is a good link. No nonsense approach to projects, smart implementation of lessons from complex adaptive systems and action orientation are the characteristics I most appreciate in the approach. I will definitely be looking for projects and environments where to apply this stuff...

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?

Selfish business?

Not too productive these days because of an annoying flu, I've been using some of my time to look for interesting sources of inspiration and I think someone like Richard Dawkins is such a source. A long time ago he took part to a TV program aimed at correcting the misinterpretation of the thesis behind his book Selfish Gene. In that TV broadcast Dr Dawkins discusses evolution theory, game theory and the value of cooperative strategies, showing how fundamentally flawed "survival of the fittest" is and how incorrect a statement "nice guys finish last" can be. It seems like an interesting follow-up to yesterday's quote of the day and good food for thought at a time of the year when many of us are thinking about their strategy for the coming year.

Change management

Change management often puts companies and project teams in shifting sands. It requires discipline, commitment, skills, resilience, creativity, people / soft skills and a hell of a lot of common sense.
The October 2005 issue of the Harvard Business Review contains an article about "The Hard Side of Change Management". The authors report the findings of a research project they started in 1992 showing that there are four "hard factors" to take into account in any change management endeavour: project duration, integrity of performance (capabilities of project teams), commitment of senior execs and staff, effort required of employees over and above their usual activities to execute the change initiative. They call their framework DICE and it's been used by the Boston Consulting Group in 1000 change initiatives since the mid-nineties to assess change management initiatives.

What I found extremely interesting was the statement that one of the most damaging assumptions companies make in dealing with change is that if a change initiative takes a long time then it is bound to fail. The authors argue that it is rather the time span between project reviews and the managerial discipline to take the lessons / the feedback from each review that are actually more significant than overall project duration. This reminded me that GE, publicly known to be one of the best managed companies in the world, undertook no more than 5-6 change initiatives in the past quarter of a century. And while the authors recognize the importance of soft aspects of change management (which I think are fundamental), they were able to isolate the significant dimensions of the "hard side". The article also makes a very valid point on the commitment of senior execs and people. I know first hand how a change initiative fails when commitment is insufficient because I took part in a major project of this type at MasterCard Europe.

Definitely a "must read" for anyone interested in change management, which I suspect is every manager in today's world.

Succeeding by design

Many factors influence successful endeavours. Few do so as much as design. Succeeding by design is a way of doing things that does not leave essential aspects of a product, a service or an experience to chance.

Realising the importance of design is a key to achieving more better results in your endeavours, the enabler to getting more satisfaction from projects. Becoming conscious of the criticality of design is the single most important factor to create your happiness and your success day after day.

Good design is about harmony and style.

Succeeding by design requires attitude and discipline because there are a few universal rules that actually underpin successful design of anything you can think of from...

• hit products like the iMac, a Cartier fountain pen or a BMW,
• to excellent service like Amazon,
• to awesome experience like a show of Maurice Béjart.

This is a book I purchased a few months ago that summarizes all these principles of design; it deals with the 80/20 rule, the way people perceive colors, how metaphors and archetypes work to convey meaning, applications of the normal curve, the golden ratio and many many other principles, all presented in a fabulous manner.
It is a goldmine if you are interested in design and a powerful source of inspiration about things you can do to enhance your experience on the planet. Of course there are a few other things you ought to be informed of, but that will be for a future post on this blog :-)

Imperfection as a core ingredient of progress

 

 

 

   
The illusion of perfection and the often painful  quest of individuals under social influence for this "ideal". Two areas on which I could write a lot because it's been my way of doing in the past. Now I just celebrate imperfection as the best engine for progress ever invented because I think a perfect life without any imperfections would be an imperfect life almost by definition. At least it would be a life that would rob us of fantastic opportunities to evolve and grow.

However, it seems that in some of our social groups or societies the very idea of failure or imperfection is sometimes enough to cause intense reactions. Some people choose to distance themselves from other people's imperfections and therefore choose to distance themselves from the people who they see as embodying them. But a person is not their behaviour nor their performance... Other people choose to blame or cooly underline the imperfection of others... Games of the shadow as Carl Jung would perhaps say.

What prompts this post, aside from my own personal path which is perfectly imperfect or perhaps imperfectly imperfect, is an article published by a Greek doctor in the Public Library of Science (an open-access scientific journal that is worth paying a visit to). John P. Ioannidis studied why most published research findings are wrong and identified factors that seem to favour this imperfection of our world. Nice to know if we are to use this as feedback. "It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false" according to the author. Well, I believe that sentence remains accurate if you replace the words "claimed research findings" by the words "of the claims of anyone of us". And that still does not mean that we should stop thinking, claiming, arguing, writing, speaking, discussing... well, living. While I am really OK about continuous improvement, I am far less happy with self-righteous "judges of Truth and Knowledge" as Einstein put it.

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods. - Albert Einstein

So let's try to celebrate all those who...

• try stuff that does not work 'cause that's how we get to stuff that works. Real life is not always like the beautiful success stories we are constantly told about ('How Mr X became an instant pop music icon' or 'The innate scientific talent of Ms Y');
• try stuff that works differently than expected 'cause that's how we got cool new products many times over;
• honor truth in practice by daring to show themselves as they are with all their imperfections 'cause they add taste to real life. An example of such a person is a guy called Thierry Janssen (meet him on his site and read the awesome stuff he writes)...

And that includes scientists who sometimes publish research that turns out to be wrong, journalists who happen to publish articles that are inaccurate, politicians who fail to implement 100% of what they promised during a campaign and many others who are only human. And yet magnificently human. Splendily imperfect and therefore truly perfect in a way. I believe every single person does their very best moment by moment to satisfy criteria that are important to them.

Now, sometimes it's useful to...

• think about the relevance of a criterion, or
• the concrete way (behaviour, action, attitude) in which someone attempts to satisfy that criterion, or
• the beliefs that underpin someone's choices, or
• whether all required capabilities are in someone's possession as they embark on an enterprise

It's all a matter of objective and intention. It's a matter of whether we choose to view failure and imperfection as a life sentence or as simple feedback that can be used to adapt ways and means. It's a matter of attitude towards our fellow human beings. At the end of the day I choose to see someone else's mistake, imperfection, failure as being also my own. That's an ingredient of progress in my opinion.

Open feedback tool

During this past year I started developing tailored training material for workshops and training sessions I am organising for my customers. The development of material for an event is always an interesting challenge, especially when customers push for a lot of content. The imperative to explain that more often than not less is more is one of the things I have to deal with on a very regular basis. Sometimes I just warn my customer of the effects of pushing for too much content and just do my best to address their requirements. At the end of the day, a customer has their set of criteria that they want to satisfy (efficiency, economy, productivity...). They also have their learning style: for some people it is learning by understanding why, for others it is learning by understanding how and for a third group it is learning by doing. I respect that because my "truth" is not above or more than their "truth".
All this leads to the issue of being able to assess how well a session went for attendees. Capturing and using feedback in a positive way is one of the keys to continuous improvement of any professional activity. Having performance indicators that mean something and can direct future action is an absolute must; of course, the value of a performance indicator lies in its business meaning, not in its existence.
So, I decided to publish under Creative Commons licence the latest version of the feedback tool I am using for the training sessions and workshops I am delivering. The criteria I decided to use make sense for me because they are derived from my definition of the experience I want for my customers when I delver a session. You are free to amend the documents below as you please; just play by the rules of the Share-Alike license of CC. The Excel document is designed to help you exploit the data collected at the end of a session. It is protected without password (so you can unprotect it if you want) and the range in which you can enter data is shaded in blue. And by the way, your feedback on this tool is most welcome!
Download 20050808_FeedbackForm.pdf
Download 20050808_FeedbackForm.doc
Download 20050808_AP_EventFeedback.xls