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.

A couple of comments on Google in 10 years

Interestingly Devinda Hardawar (@devindra on Twitter), the post's author, reminds us that Gmail was launched only in 2004. Few people can argue it's gaining traction in the segment of people who use predominantly  email in SaaS mode and even making inroads into the segment of more traditional users who are stuck with legacy solutions like Outlook Express. Gmail grew 43% in 2008 and took #3 spot in August leaving AOL behind. It's gaining momentum and is probably a good indication of what Google can do in terms of winning market share with a patient approach that it can afford thanks to its advertising revenues.

Furthermore Devindra makes a couple of very powerful statements regarding Google Wave, stating his belief that it's much more important than it may seem on the surface and could well revolutionize the way knowledge work gets done. In keeping with a recent post on this blog, I very much agree with him and do intend to spend more time testing Wave, not dismiss it as Scoble has done, foolishly in my opinion. 

Google's execution excellence

Google ability to consistently pursue specific targets is an amazing characteristic of the company. They've been able to roll out a number of major services over the past decade accomplishing key strategic targets with each of them:

1. search, their bread and butter and the foundation for any endeavor having to do with managing information at an age of information mostly uncontrolled proliferation. With that they accomplished brand recognition and created necessary technological foundations.


2. email in what was not called SaaS yet, thus increasing the touch points with the market and making a first move towards managing some of the world's information.


3. advertising based on search and content: building on the previous and targeting and industry which was both very inefficient and well endowed. With that they achieved financial viability and independence as well as consideration by financial markets.


4. analytics, building on the previous one to help make the process of marketing communications and ultimately marketing more efficient and rational. With that they earned a position as a trusted provider of quantitative information.


5. office productivity suite, to increase the share of their direct contribution towards managing the world's information by accessing a new kind of content.


6. e-commerce capabilities with Checkout, to start processing transactional information on behalf of merchants and buyers.


7. Android, to extend the reach of their services to mobile contexts and facilitate seamlessness of user experience across networks and contexts.


8. voice services, to go beyond text and enhance the experience of users across the full range of Google services with a view to serving more and better the business world.


9. technology as a service, to provide infrastructure as a service, operating system as a a service, storage as a service, programming platform as a service... and leverage the web as a platform.

Arguably, there's more and there are other ways of viewing what Google is doing, but in every case you'll find great consistency and clarity of purpose in strategy execution.

Google acquisitions: a string of success stories

Looking at the string of their acquisitions over the past decade (another way to assess strategy execution), the consistency of purpose is obvious and their ability to integrate acquired companies and technologies is impressive. Some people tend to focus too much on plays that did not turn out to be successful and fail to see the bigger picture: Google successfully embeds  80% of its acquisitions in the Google system, when the market average is much much lower (I'd say 20% based on the business news I've followed for the past 20 years).

Significant and successful moves included:

• 
  Deja in 2001, which became Google Groups, now integrated in Google Apps and arguably a successful service with important synergies with targeted advertising, Google's current bread and butter


• 
  Outride in 2001 and Kaltix in 2003 which became iGoogle, personalized search and the search wiki.


• 
  Pyra Labs and Genius Labs in 2003, which is the foundation of Blogger... No comment.
  Picasa in 2004... again not exactly a failure, especially considering the early success of Flickr


• 
  Baidu in 2004... and oh, China is a fairly big market they say...


• 
  ZipDash, Where2 and Keyhole in 2004, Endoxon in 2006 and Image America in 2007, which gave Google Maps


• Urchin in 2005, which became Google Analytics subsequently enhanced in 2007 with the licensing of GapMinder's great data visualization technologies (commercial entity was called Trendalyzer)


• Android in 2005... you have heard of the Droid success in the US I'm sure. In fact it's been estimated that 75% of all web resources visited with mobile phones in the US were either iPhone OS or Android... Nokia and Symbian are in the dust over there, so that's a decent accomplishment, no?


• @Last software, in 2006, which gave Google Sketch still insufficiently acknowledged as a revolution in computer aided design and very used in engineering communities


• Upstartle and 2Web Technologies in 2006 and Zenter in 2007, which power Google Documents, a foundation for online office productivity applications and online form building


• JotSpot in 2006, which became Google Sites, an extremely powerful tool that some people like David Dossot (not exactly a tech nitwit) use to build websites and some other use to provide customized secure online workspaces for their customers (BusinessQuests humbly but proudly claims to be among them)


• Grand Central in 2007, which became Google Voice and is still insufficiently acknowledged as a major disruption in telecoms because it does enable a form of unified messaging & communications


• DoubleClick in 2007, which I believe holds a good share in all of its markets
  Postini in 2007, which provides fantastic anti-spam protection for all Google Apps for email users, amongst which yours truly very humbly and happily so


• re-CAPTCHA this year, arguably a good security enhancement for Blogger
  and last but not least YouTube in 2006, which I think was a fair success amply justifying its acquisition price of 1.7 billion USD

Google is recorded as having purchased 59 companies for a total amount that is hard to assess but likely stands in the region of 15-18 billion USD. The track record of acquisitions can in no way be considered as bad. In fact I know only of one company that is better: Cisco. Both Google and Cisco are hugely analytical players, with extra smart employees on board, giving huge attention to recruitment and equally huge attention to acquisitions.

Another thing worth mentioning is Google's creation of an arm dedicated to early stage investments, which is called Google Ventures, a fund that started this year with 100 million USD. Google Ventures has made a couple of very smart bets in clean-tech with smart grid technology (Silver Spring Networks) and biotechnology (Adimab)...

Tim Berners-Lee calls for the next leap: raw data

Through a recent post of one of my contacts, I got to view for a second time a presentation Tim Berners-Lee gave at TED for the 20 years of the web. What had not struck me the first time I saw the presentation is the claim Berners-Lee makes that everything we have today of the web resulted from the idea of hyperlink / hypertext. A big bang of sorts. 

It's almost a stereotype of the kind of claims brilliant conceptual types do, because they're so focused on discovery, innovation in its rawest form, beginnings and not necessarily finished forms... which is also one of the reasons why Tim Berners-Lee was not the many economic beneficiary of the discovery. Can you imagine the turn of events had he decided to patent the hyperlink idea and ask for a trillionth of a Euro for each hyperlink created? One of the reasons why I'm not a fan of extreme patenting and rigid copyright.

In this presentation Tim Berners-Lee calls from a new leap, which he thinks is as important as the hyperlink: open availability of raw data. Can you imagine what that means if he's right? I'm ready to bet he is and I'm ready to bet it's a matter that's far more important than data: it's a matter of civilization and a defining factor for civil liberties. 

His presentation  mentions several examples and he mentions the excellent work of Professor Hans Rosling that I covered in December 2006 in this post (here are the notes of Rossling's talk back then).

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:

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.

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...

Philippe Stark on design

What inspiration and fun Philippe Stark can be! There's more than meets the eye in what he says in this presentation...

Inspiration of the day

Impossible is sometimes an excuse for not trying enough different ways for reaching a goal. Many thanks to Anne (Institut Ressources), Sylviane and JH (Media4) for letting me have this gift today.

Are You Going To Finish Strong? Awesome video! If you watch only one video today make sure it is this one! Nick Vujicic has no limbs but he leads an incredible life!

Roubini confirms deep crisis: how will you shield your business?

Nouriel Roubini’s (RGE – Wikipedia –  Page at NYU Stern) interview on Bloomberg is something you ought to listen carefully (podcast at the end of this post) if you’re a business founder, a manager or an asset owner. It’s not exactly the sort of content that will boost your morale, but I don’t believe the Coué method is the right way to go because it’s much more than a mere crisis of confidence. On the other hand neither denial, nor pessimism are going to take us anywhere.

Rather a pragmatic take on the situation is an essential first step if you’re serious about adapting and being in a position to fully benefit from an eventually recovering economy. This is only one of the reasons why it’s worth getting down to some of the implications of this analysis for business. Today helping business people deal with anxiety and make sense of this chaos is part of my work in different industries, from commodities to tech-innovative sectors, in different areas of Europe. So what does a pragmatic analysis of the situation mean for business? Read on and listen to the podcast.

Economics have seldom been as crucial to business as today. That’s a fact across the board, from young industries enjoying the fat marging allowed by rapid innovation to older highly commoditized sectors. So it only makes sense to be listening to scholars and thought leaders – at least those who have been issuing alerts for the past decade or so: Roubini, Stiglitz, Krugman, Taleb, Bernstein, Bookstaber, Tobin, Thoma…  

Roubini’s assertions – well documented, no doubt – that the top US banks are probably insolvent and that China is probably in recession, not merely “just” growing slowly, are causes for concern. His analysis during the interview with Bloomberg suggests the following:

1. 
   
   the massive amounts of money already committed by governments and central banks may not be enough to take the world economy out of the crisis within an acceptable number of quarters. In fact we may be looking at a period of several years of slow and painful economic growth


2. it’s probably going to take more than government stimulus measures to clean-up the mess created by years of recklessness in government, greed and lack of integrity in financial services and shameful collusion between those who were supposed to control and assess (audit firms, rating agencies, regulators) and those who should have been controlled


3. 
   
   there is a need to completely review the international financial system and its governance, which was (re)shaped by followers of the infernal Bush-Greenspan duo during the past decade in a way that makes key institutions like the World Bank, the IMF, the Bank for International Settlements and even a number of programs of the United Nations (UNDP, International Conference on financing for development…), useless or powerless. This adds to the concerns of those of us who doubt the viability of a global economic and financial system working in a wicked way as "poor" nations in effect lend to "rich" nations. At the end of the day, globalization can be extremely beneficial, but should be reviewed, in particular when it comes to global trade liberalization, which has been artificially disconnected from labor, social and other human development issues: if international trade is based on markets playing freely, then how can the lower cost of producing in countries without any form of welfare state not lower global standards of human development?
   Yet another ill effect of failing to build multilateral support and a clear indication that the world governance cannot remain unchanged if peace, progress and prosperity are goals we want to pursue.

The picture Roubini paints is pretty grim and scary, but factually speaking he’s probably right and we need to acknowledge and take stock of the situation as it is right not, not by discovering ugly bits and nasty pieces of the big picture in a seemingly unending stream of randomly chosen snapshots. Nothing is more damaging to business confidence than the constantly disproval of previously accepted opinions as to the scope and depth of the crisis.

With most economies in a state of frozen shock,  difficult access to cash and several assets fast becoming almost illiquid, the degree of anxiety is high in business, for owners, managers and employees alike. The principal cause is not the crisis itself, but the uncertainty about its real nature, its consequences and its true extent as well as the often unspoken lack of confidence that governments know how to solve this one.

So considering the work I do with customers in Europe, the most important implications for business are as follows:

For established businesses

Despite government’s efforts to pump cash into the economy, banks seem completely upset, fearful and paralyzed to the point of actually failing to making funds available even to established and fundamentally healthy businesses. So, if you’re managing an established business, perhaps a family owned business that cannot rely on access to global money markets, you need to consider the following:

1. 
   
   make sure you reduce the amount of cash you business needs to operate by pulling all levers from operational efficiency to customer relationships and supplier relationships management. In one of the businesses I’m advising negotating with supplliers to reduce the volume of raw materials purchased and kept in inventory, made a measurable impact on net working capital


2. 
   
   secure the stability and reliability of any short-term funding and credit lines you’ve arranged to get from your banks. Banks are always willing to lend you an umbrella when it’s not raining and when it’s raining on them things can get pretty shaky. To achieve this goal you need to communicate on a regular basis in as open a manner as you can with your bank. At another company we’ve gone the extra mile to discuss the business plan with the bank, especially as it contained a forecast for the cash situation of end 2008


3. 
   
   consider reviewing core processes that can be improved to use less cash. Now, that’s a great area in which to consider better use of information technology whether to achieve a more efficient link between inputs and outputs, getting closer to demand-driven production or to improve logistics and customer service. Being a user of some of the latest stuff I’m utterly amazed at how slow adoption is in most established businesses. This is a great time to adopt, especially when you adopt tools and methods that make you more efficient, more effective and faster. Just a hint: consider Salesforce, the Zoho suite of applications and Basecamp…


4. 
   
   adopt cheaper means for communicating and spending time with customers: voice over IP exists, so you don’t need to pay these outrageous roaming charges (hint: take a look at Jajah, a company I covered 3 years ago on this blog, and your phone will never look the same again…). Another little something you might want to consider is Cisco’s Webex or telepresence (here’s a video by an employee of the company), to interact with your customers without having to spend precious time and money travelling.


5. 
   
   train, train, train and train your people for better expertise on your business, on your industry, on their functional areas. Also, train for better customer service. It’s amazing how few customer facing professionals know how to actively listen to customers and get down to what they really need, cutting through what they say.

For more recent going concerns

For more recent going concerns, the issues highlighted above for older and more established companies
are valid and should be considered although one may assume that in many
cases younger going concerns have better patterns of adoption of new
tools and methods. In your case, you need to be concerned with your
customer portfolio because unlike older more established companies you
are likelier to be more exposed to commercial and customer credit risk.
One of my customers is in this situation and we know full well that it
is crucial to keep close contact with all key customers and to go the
extra mile to share a bit of the burden of going through this storm.
Something that’s been possible in this case was to agree on a
schedule for payments such that the immediate pressure on key
customers’ cash situation is reduced by 10% to 15% and those customers
commit to a longer term supplier relationship with my client. Factors to be considered with special care include

1. 
   
   the concentration of business with a smaller set of customers that increases the business and financial risk if those customers require less of what you’re offering


2. the nature of these customers and where tey are in terms of life-cycle: startups, growth stage, recent going-concern or established company. Beware this parameter though because many business pros tend to have a bias for it in their decision making: if there’s something we should learn from the collapse of “blue chips” like Enron, Bear Sterns and Fortis, that’s the fact that one cannot assume a large and old company to be better, safer or more reliable than a younger and smaller player


3. the industry in which your customers operate because you’re likely to see some domino effect if you’re working a lot with financial institutions or car companies for example. Same thing if you’re serving companies that sell products and services that are not essential, “must have” items.

For start-ups and companies at growth stage

For startups and companies looking to finance growth, I know for a fact that there are good businesses out there with healthy commercial situations and well-performing operations that nevertheless find themselves under financial pressure. As long as there will be such situations investors who have cash to invest are likelier to acquire distressed assets than new businesses or growing businesses without long track records or whose industry is too unstable. So, if you own or manage an early-stage or growth-stage business, especially if you are considering to raise money, you need to consider the following:

1. consider what happens if your don’t raise a dime and identify where your pragmatic opportunities actually are


2. get back to the drawing board and drop every
   single activity, service, offering that does not give you paying
   customers or financiallly quantifiable results within 3–6 months


3. reconsider funding strategy to use all the tips and ticks of bootstrapping (here’s a great resource from Inc magazine and here are inspirations
   from companies that started on less than 1,000 euros) in order to be
   able to provide service to customers even if your product is not
   complete
   the time when you could say you had a company
   without having a business model are over for some time at least. I’ve
   always been extremely skeptical about how adequate it is for people to
   venture without a business model (see post of 2006 here)

Enjoy Roubini’s interview and visit his RGE site.

Widenoise just released by WideTag

Even the longest journey starts with the first step… As WideTag releases WideNoise I feel this is the best way to describe the event because WideTag’s stated destination is to be a leading player when the Internet of Things becomes reality.

As WideTag’s CTO often says, there is a still a hell of a lot of stuff missing from the real world for the Internet of Things to happen, but one ought to start with what we’ve got, include new stuff that is coming up and build whatever is missing.

WideNoise, designed by a beautiful team released yesterday as an iPhone application that allows you to socially share data about the noise level at a specific location, is very much the result of this very pragmatic approach: use an existing networked device that has at least one sensor embedded to offer a first application of a “spime”. What’s a spime? It’s a device capable of recording and transmitting location coordinates as well as information about its immediate surrounding, e.g. temperature, carbon dioxide concentration… Now, spimes are likely to play a prominent role in the Internet of Things. Although it’s quite geeky as a concept (if you’re interested read this), there are three reasons why it’s noteworthy:

1. spimes will be (already are) all over the place in a matter of a few years using technologies (RFID, GSM, GPRS, GPS, GoogleMaps…) that only need assembling


2. with the environmental crisis we need to measure our “physical” world in order to make smarter (micro-)decisions from whether to use a car to how to manage the powergrid dynamically


3. the flow of data that will be captured will in part BELONG TO YOU so you don’t want it taken from you without your consent or in a way that is so proprietary you can’t control it, which is one of the reasons why WideTag seeks to make things open, something it started doing with OpenSpime, an initiative aimed at offering open protocols and technologies to the world for building and operating the spimes of the future

In fact, Widenoise is also a bridge between the “pure vision” of the Internet of Things (where objects are supposed to exchange information and form self-configuring networks for relaying the data) and today’s reality of applied technology becoming increasingly “social” and hybrid in that it mixes hardware, software and people to create value for participants. So has WideTag managed to make noise social as a very nice post of this morning claims?

Congratulations Nimbuzz!

Almost a year and a half ago on I covered Nimbuzz on this blog because I felt they had a pretty cool and promising proposition. Since, their team has been able to progress even more and get to the point of receiving the prestigious Red Herring Global 100 award.
As always, I am thrilled to see entrepreneurial ventures find their way and reach new heights, so congrats to the team of Nimbuzz for beautifully pursuing an entrepreneurial quest that creates value.

Awesome innovation at WideTag and sr labs

One thing is certain: my current trip to Milan is most interesting. That's mainly because I had working sessions and discussions with three exceptional persons, the founders of WideTag, Leandro Agrò (blog - profile - a conference he co-founded - idearium and leading designed at sr labs until a couple of years back), Roberto Ostinelli (profile - a multi-talented individual who's a beautiful artist as well as an accomplished technologist and business person) and David Orban (blog - profile). The achievements of that little bunch of determined persons have been very significant indeed over the course of the past 10 months and they create a foundation on which to create more.
As a coincidence of sorts I also got a great opportunity to learn about a fascinating Italian company called sr labs and to actually try their amazing i-able product which makes it possible to control and command a computer solely with one's eyes. It's quite an extraordinary experience because of the incredible precision of the device, its ease of use and the speed at which one gets acquainted with the way the product works. Aside from obvious applications to help disabled people access and control a computer, there is a range of other fields in which the eye tracking technology could be applied. Definitely worth a closer look...   

Could Sorell's greater online engagement help push for WPP digital leadership?

Excerpts from a BusinessWeek article with some fairly interesting info about the goals and obstacles faced by WPP as it tries to transform itself into a next generation marketing agency. Interestingly Martin Sorell, its CEO is pushing employees and Board Directors alike to adopt new practices from video, to Facebook, to Twitter and other social tools. And that's the right way to go for this sort of transition from yesterday to tomorrow, an endeavor only very few companies managed to achieve in business history.

Now, since I believe that coherence, alignment and consistency are essential ingredients of success as the US presidential super-campaign amply demonstrated, I wanted to check whether Sorell, the staunch promoter of WPP's diitization, has done anything for himself to be more present, more digital, more of a "social networker" I looked for his profile on LinkedIn and the result was, I quote, "0 results

for


Martin Sorell". Same thing on Naymz and Plaxo, while on Facebook there's only one entry without pictures and with one friend called Mélanie Pineau. So let me get this: we're about to have the first awesomely digital US President in Barack Obama (present on all sorts of online platforms from Facebook to LinkedIn to Twitter to a YouTube channel and with fans forming Plaxo groups like this one), and the head of tomorrow's would-be leading agency is nowhere to be seen? When is Sorell going to assemble a small team of WPP wiz kids to build his own onine presence? That would go a long way to making his push with employees and close co-workers much more compelling IMHO.

clipped from www.businessweek.com

strategy to make the $15 billion agency a leader in the emerging world of digital communications

At an Oct. 20 board meeting in Palo Alto, Calif., Sorrell had all the directors—including himself—learn how to upload video and create their own Facebook pages

chairman of interactive marketing company OgilvyOne, figures he pays 15% to 30% more to hire young people with one-third less experience than those versed in traditional advertising channels

Sorrell also is pushing for greater cooperation among WPP companies to incorporate TV, video, print, mobile technology, and social networking into every campaign

WPP recently won a hefty portion of a Johnson & Johnson

widely reported to be worth more than $100 million

WPP staged a science fair-style presentation inside JWT's New York office, where representatives from 20 WPP units sat in different booths, showing off displays such as a WPP-designed social network promoting a prescription drug and an interactive Web site to inform doctors

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.

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...

A contrarian's view

If we are serious about dealing with durable (human) development and the type of world we will leave to future generations (not only in the economically developed world), it is worth listening to well documented views from contrarians like Bjorn Lomborg, whose book Cool It I strongly recommend. Worth considering on this Blog Action Day I think. His presentation at TED Talks can be viewed at the end of this post.

What I like about what he develops is that:

1. he makes the case for immediate action on stuff that matters today and has consequences tomorrow, possibly preparing people and nations to better deal with threats that we cannot possibly fathom



2. his approach involves considering the issues of the human condition in an integral manner, not looking at matters in isolation



3. he considers the limited nature of current resources and outlines a path for a rational use of those resources to achieve the goal of a wealthier and more balanced world



4. taking an integral approach forces us to confront the contradictions of our current ways with barely conceivable imbalances between endeavours of different types and merits



5. considering costs and benefits and focusing on currently achievable steps while keeping an end goal in mind is precisely what will break the loosing game of the prisonner's dilema as outlined in a recent article of The Economist

A convenient Nobel Peace Prize: challenges ahead remain

Thrilled is probably the best way to describe how I feel at the news that the Nobel Peace Price is to be shared between the scientific community represented by the IPCC and Al Gore. At a time when Exxon is going out of its way to influence public opinions and governments against taking radical action about climate change and when Fox is doing everything it possibly can (serving which masters, I wonder?) to exploit imperfections in An Inconvenient Truth, the Nobel Prize is exactly what is needed to further tip the balance in favor of immediate action. I suspect it is also a great moment for a very special production company called Participate, which I covered on this blog over a year ago.
The challenge is huge especially when one factors into what needs to be done about climate change the following:

1. China's explosive growth that is by no means environmentally friendly (see excerpt from Gore's documentary below)












2. the fact that the growth of the other BRIC countries is not necessariy more sustainable than China's



3. US indifference to Kyoto and hostility to accepting limitations and binding measures to curb emissions and move towards a cleaner and more sustainable economic model, which presumably cannot continue to be based on unchecked mass consumption of goods engineered for a limited useful life (programmed obsolescence is the technical word for it)



4. the ethical conundrum that we all find ourselves trapped into in the sense that the developed world reached its current level of welfare by using natural resources without consideration for their limited nature and therefore is not in a moral position to force less-developed nations to subject their growth to an overarching goal of durable development



5. the dynamics that are currently in place worldwide and which were very well described in a recent article of The Economist (covered here) arguing that game theory could be used to actually bring the world out of the current deadlock

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...