REALLY Scooped by Guy Kawasaki

Many times, I come up with blogging topics while on my daily walk. I usually get into a rhythm, and then my mind "zones out". About an hour later, I find myself walking up my driveway, ideas at the ready..

Yesterday, I was thinking about how ineffective Mission Statements are at "rallying the troops." I came to the conclusion that if you could boil down what your company really does, into a few words, that it would be far more effective in providing direction to every company employee.

I once worked for a company that printed safety signs, labels and tags. We had a long mission statement (I know, I was one of the people who crafted it.) We talked about value creation and shareholders and leading our markets - all the stuff that no one (except an investor or Board Member) could easily relate to.

What my company really did, was; Keep employees safe. Within this context, everyone's job became clear. R&D looked at how to make our signs withstand harsh manufacturing environments, to be seen in low (or no) light. They worried about font sizes, color brightness, the effectiveness of graphics. None of these activities would ever have been spawned by our esoteric Mission statement.

Shipping departments understood the importance of getting the orders out the same day - after all someone's well being might depend upon it.

Manufacturing looked for ways to cost effectively make a unit of one - to satisfy any safety requirement - to customize any safety message (not just the ones we could come up with).

Marketing understood that "Keeping employees safe", meant facility access and emergency egress as well. They understood that safety extended from signs to locks and lockouts. It meant visually marking all major piping in plants. It also meant labelling and handling of hazardous materials, safety signs in multiple languages...and on and on.....

It was going to be a really good blog.

Before I could get started writing, I discovered this excellent keynote presentation from Guy Kawasaki who discusses the exact points I was going to make. Except of course, he did it first (and far more effectively than I could).

Warning: This video is about an hour long. Guy discusses mission statements and what he calls "Mantra" in the first ten minutes or so.

It's worth every minute.

Guy Kawasaki - The Art of Innovation 55:38 Guy Kawasaki at the 2007 Event Marketer Conference

Windshield Wipers and Data Integrity

Tell me. When do you notice a problem with your car's windshield wipers?

Answer: When you need to use them. (And then, it's too late.)

On dry, sunny days, cruising along the highway, we never give a thought to our windshield wipers. We enjoy the ride. We get to our destination.

The same is true for data integrity. We don't spend much time thinking about our company's data or it's accuracy. We process transactions in our system. We serve customers. We generate reports, we close the books. 'Nuff said.

Then comes the day when we decide to upgrade our system, or do a deep dive into the data to solve a problem. And we discover that our data is terrible.

Just when we need to use it.

It's a lesson learned by EVERY company at least once in it's lifetime. Systems don't ensure data integrity, PEOPLE do. Sure, your system has edit checks, makes you complete all the fields and may even do some duplicate entry checking. But it doesn't do everything!

Anyone who has gone through a major systems implementation can tell you that data cleansing and data integrity of the legacy system chews up a significant amount of a project budget (as much as 10%-15% of the total cost).

And it's this crappy information you're basing business decisions on every day.

I've worked for a number of profitable companies who have learned this lesson. My last ERP project uncovered that within our legacy system, we were using more than 20,000 chart of accounts across the organization. More than 20,000!

Our Purchasing function had created more than 45,000 vendors in our legacy system. That's more than Wal-Mart! Even though the legacy system cost many millions of dollars, our Purchasing department couldn't prepare a report of how much we purchased from individual vendors. They asked the vendors to supply that information to us each year!

When we completed our project, our team had reduced the chart of accounts to less than 2,000 and our vendor list had been culled to less than a quarter of it's previous size. In the course of the exercise, we uncovered many duplicates, inaccuracies and data omissions.

Why? Because no one "owned" the data. Everyone relied on "the system". It's easy to blame something that can't argue back. Stupid software.

Usually, ERP implementations create new business roles. (note I didn't say I.T. roles). The folks who enter the data, who use the data, who rely upon the data, need to own the data.

In my case, our company created two new positions. Only one Financial person had the authority to create a new account within the system. This insured that no duplicate use accounts were entered because the data owner acted as the gatekeeper. You don't need THAT account, use this account instead (like everyone else). So few new accounts were created, and the size (and more importantly the integrity) of our accounting system remained intact.

On the Purchasing side, we dramatically reduced the number of people who were authorized to create new vendor records. This forced our purchasing users to spend a little more time searching for an existing vendor, rather than simply adding them again (with a slightly different spelling). Reports were created to monitor the growth of the account to warn us if new vendors were being created faster than expected.

Once the business took ownership for the data, the quality of the data improved dramatically.

The moral of the story?

Even though the sun is shining, take a look at your windshield wipers.

The Importance of Mindset

Several days ago, I wrote a blog called David vs. Goliath I.T. Tactics, where I discussed some strategies for a small company to compete against much larger I.T. resources of their competitors.

Fresh from a link on the Signal vs Noise blog, comes an interview with Jason Freid, President of 37signals. 37signals is a small (8 person) software company that builds easy to use applications for project management, to do lists, chat and the like. They have over 1,000,000 customers.

They see small as being a big advantage.

Jason makes several great points that guide their busness philosophy. While watching this video, it struck me that perhaps his greatest tool against being small, is his mindset. He sees small as an advantage and doesn't measure success by the number of employees (exactly the opposite!)

Some of the takeaways from the video.

1. Keep business structure loose.
2. No long term planning (no one ever gets it right anyway - stay in the 30-90 day zone).
3. Increase influence not headcount. Making a big influence is better than making a big payroll (my words).
4. Proximity kills productivity. Large teams, co-located tend to interrupt more than help each other, in Jason's experience. Half of their staff (4 people) are entirely remote.
5. Compete against FREE by providing products with value (that people are willing to pay for).
6. Don't limit your talent pool by geography.

And perhaps the best advice.

7. You don't have to be a big company to do big things. (The internet levels the playing field and allows you to be discovered - allows you the customer reach that once required huge investment by big companies.)

Perhaps 37signals' biggest competitive weapon is their mindset.

Hiring Athletes

A colleague once noted that I tended to hire "athletes" rather than "position players" - that I chose personal performance attributes over specific experience within a position.

In retrospect, I think he was right.

After all, in my experience, I've seldom hired someone into a job that they were expected to have for a very long time. Even technical positions (at least in my experience) get rotated to provide growth opportunities for staff or to increase depth at a specific position. So to me, it always seemed appropriate to hire "athletes".

Athletes are people who possess that "spark". They're people you want to work with. They smile a lot. They're bright and energetic. They look you in the eye. The very best "athletes" have one additional trait.

They're curious.

They ask a lot of questions. They wonder how things work. They need to know why we do things the way we do. They have a built-in desire to improve things and an energy level to make it happen. They'll come up with three ways to do address a problem, not just one.

To carry the athlete analogy further, baseball manager's love "utility players" - players who can perform well at many positions - not just the one they were hired to play. It allows managers the flexibility to "tune" their lineups - moving players into positions to allow for more right (or left) handed batters depending upon the opposing pitcher. If a position player goes into a batting slump, a utility player can easily be substituted to improve offensive power against an opponent.

Hiring athletes, at least in my experience, provides the employee with a potentially wider range of experiences and improves your team's strength and flexibility to adapt to challenges.

Next time you need to fill a vacancy, ask yourself, "Is this person an "athlete?" If the answer is yes, hire them.

Great Grandma's Roast

Stories are wonderful things - especially in business. They're usually told to make a point or to educate the listener or perhaps to evoke an emotion. The good ones are entertaining, easily remembered and easily retold. They're a very effective teaching tool.

And we don't tell enough of them.

They're important to the lifeblood of any organization. Some stories capture a sense of company history. Remember the innovation spirit evoked by early HP commercials with Carly Fiorina standing in front of the shed where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard invented together at the beginning of their partnership? Nowadays you have to search the HP site to find these stories. Like too many stories, they're buried deep in the bowels of the organization.

And untold stories are assets, wasted.

Sometimes the stories are based in historical fact. Sometimes they may even be made up. It doesn't matter. As long as the stories are entertaining, teachable moments, easily remembered and easily retold, they serve their purpose.

One of my favorites is told by my I.T. teams when implementing new processes. Too often, when you ask employees why they perform a function they way they do, the answer is either;

1. We've always done it that way.
2. That's the way I was shown how to do it.

The real answer of course, is "I don't know."

And then we tell this story.

One evening, while helping with preparations for a dinner with his in-laws, a husband noticed his wife slicing the ends off the roast, before placing it in the pan to be cooked.

"Honey, why do you do that?" he asked.

"That's the way my mother taught me to do it." came the reply.

Later that evening at the dinner table, still curious, the husband asked his mother-in-law about the practice.

"That's the way MY mother taught me to do it." she responded.

A couple of weeks later, while visiting Great Grandma, the husband couldn't resist asking again.

"Great Grandma, I have to know. Why do you always cut the ends off the roast before putting it in the pan to be cooked?"

"That's easy dear. My roasting pan is too small to fit a big roast." she replied.

I don't remember who first told me this story, but I've never forgotten it.

WTV - Video Sampler

Earlier this week I wrote a blog called WTV the New RTFM, which promoted the use of video instruction vs. providing the old boring manual.

While I was suggesting that your company create it's own video content, for training, promotion, etc, let's not forget the video content that's easily culled from the Web.

Here's a collection of interesting video clips put together by Seth Godin and some of his readers.

They're terrific.

Enjoy.

A Business Gem

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of working for a very dynamic and creative CEO. I was fortunate enough to have an office within 50 feet of hers.

She liked to keep things simple and frequently passed along (what I call) "business gems."

One day, she shared her thoughts on what made a successful leader. Here's the magic recipe.

A successful leader has to do three things.

1. Create a clear and compelling mission.
2. Put the right people in the right jobs.
3. Knock down barriers to their success.

I don't know whether this advice was original or not, but it struck a nerve with me and I've tried to follow it ever since.

And now YOU know.

David vs. Goliath I.T. Tactics

I was talking to a company yesterday (let's call them ACME) about their I.T. function. They are a successful company who have been around a long time. In their industry, they're the runt of the litter. All their key competitors are many times their size.

While they produce competitive products and are growing rapidly, they're struggling to "keep up" with technological advances of their competitors. After all, they share customers with competitors who provide glossy, full featured business portals, plug'n'play system integration capabilities and who knows what else.

The competition has I.T. resources that dwarf the size of ACME's.

In some cases, small can be a competitive advantage. When your resources are constrained it's important that you make smart decisions about projects. Here's some suggestions that came to mind.

1. Make a list of things your I.T. department should STOP doing. Clear the decks of any development activity that isn't specifically addressing your competitive situation.

2. Edit the To Do list to two or three critical enhancements. In my experience, teams can get paralyzed by the sheer length of the To Do list. (I know it happens to me, whenever I glance at my "to do" list around the house!). Once you get a few tasks knocked off the list, your team can begin to build momentum.

3. Throw the rest of the To Do list away. Your priorities will be extremely dynamic and will likely change several times before you ever revisit the list. Once you've completed the first three, then have the business decide on the next three.

4. Steal ideas shamelessly and make them your own. When you're playing catch-up, you can't afford the time to reinvent the wheel. (Can you EVER afford the time?) Use Pareto's rule and look for the 20% of the competitor's services that deliver 80% of the value and implement those. Large companies have a tendency to tie up their tremendous I.T. resources on features and functionality that their customers will rarely (if ever) use. In some cases large I.T. organizations suffer from the "we'll do it because we can" mentality. Take advantage of that.

5. Try for quick wins by implementing quickly. Look for packaged applications that can be quickly integrated and deliver quick results. Use your peer network (in non competing industries) - how do you handle EDI, what Portal software do you use and why?

6. Make the hard decisions about your talent pool. One excellent I.T. resource can be as effective as three or four average-to-poor resources. Judge fairly, but judge quickly. And don't be afraid to open your wallet to get the expertise you need. Make the case with HR that you're expanding the scope and responsibilities of the positions, not just replacing the junior level Business Analyst. Underperformers have a bigger negative impact on smaller teams than on larger teams (where they can more readily disappear into the woodwork).

7. Keep an eye on the horizon, but stay in the present. It's easy to be distracted by minutia (while we're doing this, we could also fix that). Stay focused on the present and achieve. You'll get to those other opportunities later.

Do you have any additional thoughts that might help ACME out?

WTV... The New RTFM

In the olden days, I often heard support people within the I.T. department use the phrase RTFM - Read the Freaking Manual. Our internal customers, when faced with the choice of picking up a manual to answer a question, always preferred to pick up the phone and call for help.

Nowadays, it seems that manuals are almost obsolete. By many, they're still seen as the reference of last resort.

And maybe that's the way it should be.

Today, we have access to loads of technology that enables us to make short, informative videos explaining how to use a computer system, describing a business process, educating viewers on policy or procedures. It's faster, cheaper and frankly, more fun to do than writing a manual.

And video is perfect format for the YouTube generation.

I'd much rather watch a video than read a manual any day. Video training's time has come.

WTV (Watch the Video) is the new RTFM.

Who's Your Bubba?

A friend recommended a terrific book, called Designing the Obvious, by Robert Hoekman Jr. This book is all about designing web applications for ease of use.

One of the concepts Hoekman espouses, is to create a persona for each type of user - a brief description of a "typical" user of the application. You give your persona a name, a career and a business challenge he (or she) is struggling with (that you're trying to solve). You might even download a random photo from the web and give your persona a "face".

The exercise is indended to help you get inside the head of your customer. To change your perspective. To see things from your customer's point of view.

It reminded me of a road trip that our Marketing department took, several years ago, to a well known Direct Marketing company that specializes in outdoor recreation (hunting, fishing, camping and the like).

They told us the story of "Bubba".

"Bubba" was the name of their typical customer. They could describe what Bubba looked like, what Bubba liked to eat and what clothes he typically wore. They knew what truck (not car) he drove. They knew how much money he made and what he liked to do on his time off. No matter who we talked to, Bubba's description remained remarkably consistent.

And everything they did required Bubba's approval. If they wanted to add a new line of fishing lures, they needed Bubba's permission. If they wanted to expand their line of fishing boats, Bubba's truck needed to be able to tow them. Before deciding to expand their line of firearms, Bubba had to be able to afford them.

When their Marketing department held meetings, they typically reserved a chair for Bubba.

The concept might sound a little corny, but it worked. They never lost sight of the customer. And they were very successful with this technique.

How do you sustain customer focus? Does your company have a Bubba?

Swiss Army Applications

Why is it that precious few "productivity tools" actually make me more productive?

I think it's because productivity tools are designed to make their designer more productive, not me.

And I think that explains the rising adoption of applications like widgets and gadgets - snippets of single purpose code which can be assembled on a desktop to address small specific needs - as an alternative to a "full featured" office productivity suite.

You pick and choose just what you need and ignore the rest.

Maybe that's why I never owned a Swiss Army knife. I didn't like the idea of always carrying all the tools around, whether you'd ever need them or not. I could I never get one to open up and I didn't know what half the tools were for!

Business Organics

Fast Company features an article by Richard Watson called Unearth Growth by Digging in the Dirt. He compares some aspects of business to nurturing the growth of plants.

It's not the first time I've come across this analogy.

Back in 2001 my CEO opened our annual report with a similar story comparing business and nature.

Both these stories remind us that rather than fight business conditions, we need to embrace them. The stock markets will surge. The stock markets will retreat.

If farmers acted like many business people, they'd never buy seed or plant fields the year following a poor crop.

Simple is Hard

For the past few days, I've been working on developing a web application with a partner of mine. Our goal is to offer an application that is intuitive to use and contains just enough features to make the application extremely useful. A small software company called 37Signals has long professed this philosophy.

Being an old time I.T. guy, my DNA drives me to design feature rich applications, where every conceivable need is addressed. Too often, the result is an application that is so complicated, that no one uses it. The kind where you need to provide an hour's training for a 5 minute process.

For our latest project, we began by brainstorming all the possible features we'd "need".

And then we spent three days eliminating most of them.

Just when we thought the application couldn't get any simpler, I invited a friend over, who happens to be a subject matter expert (and a potential customer). I can always count on him to give me the unvarnished truth.

Three hours (and four beers) later, our application had lost another 30% of it's features, and 50% of the copywriting had to be changed.

I've learned a few things from this experience.

It's very difficult to get outside one's own head - to really see the project from the customer's perspective. To eliminate your biases. To expose your assumptions. To fight against the compulsion to complicate.

Simple is hard.

Lean Application Development starts with Great Business Relationships

I was reading a McKinsey Quarterly article entitled Applying Lean to Application Development and Maintenance this morning.

They do a nice job of identifying the waste in many Application Development process efforts.

As I was reading the chart, it struck that one way to reduce or eliminate much of this waste is by forging strategic alliances with your business partners.

As you look at the activities identified as wasteful, they all stem from the "throw the I.T. development request over the transom" mentality - which arises from businesses with an "arms length" relationship with their own I.T. resources.

If you think about it, many of the same challenges would exist if you were trying to teach a blind man to drive a car! There would be frequent stops and abrupt starts. Turning the car would be fraught with peril, including frequent visits to the shoulder of the road. Priorities would be misunderstood. (Turn right. No - the OTHER right!). I suspect the journey would be frightening and would definitely take a long time - just like Application Development.

However, with an experienced, sighted driver - one who knows the destination, can see the road ahead, understands and interprets the road signs, can adapt to changing conditions (traffic, weather, road construction), the journey can be made successfully.

One of the first things a company can do when implementing lean manufacturing, is reorganize the plant floor, making sure that the equipment and processes are setup in a way that enable, support and optimize manufacturing flow.

The I.T. equivalent is adapting your organizational structure to better align your I.T. resources with their (functional) business counterparts. The closer the relationship you can develop with your business peers, the better your mutual understanding of the challenges, the better visibility into business priorities, the clearer the roadmap.

And you will have taken a giant step towards lean Application Development.

This isn't the entire answer, but it's a good place to start.

Soak Time

Maybe I'm just getting old. But it seems to me that life is happening at an ever increasing speed. This velocity is preventing us from solving the world's really big problems. The media provides us with 3-5 minute shouting matches, where participants recite each side's talking points, (usually talking over one another), then it's on to the next topic.

Our political leaders talk in sound bites, carefully orchestrated to coincide with the "news cycle". We're constantly blurring the lines between news and entertainment.

We're bombarded with "spin".

No real debate. No in depth analysis of the situation and what we need to do about it. Just because we've spent time "on the topic" doesn't actually advance a solution.

A former boss of mine had a great concept. She talked about "soak time" - the time it took an organization to understand a mission or vision and to begin acting on it. She understood that just because you tell someone a plan doesn't mean they get it right away.

They need time to understand, to question, to internalize the message. Time to take the message to heart, before they can effectively commit to it.

Today 24 hr/day sound bites wash over us like a hard rain on parched dry soil. Rivers of information (such that it is), don't get a chance to "soak in".

I think we're all looking for a slow steady rain of ideas and civil discussion, to enable the challenges to soak in. Until we allow ourselves a little "soak time", we're not going to engage enough people to make substantial headway.

It's time to slow down and make haste.

Bubble 2.0? I Don't See It.

John Dvorak's recent article in PC magazine, predicting the bursting of the Web 2.0 "bubble" started me thinking.. Is he right?

I started searching for the unbridled exuberance that was present with Web 1.0 (let's call it the E-Commerce era) - where venture capitalists would throw money at anyone doing anything on the Web. Expectations ran rampant - "clicks would replace bricks". Everything would be done over the web. Anyone could become the next Wal-Mart.

I don't see it today. Certainly there are well publicized acquisitions happening in the Web world, but acquisitions happen all the time in the non-web world as well - and they're lauded. Wall Street likes it "when deals get done".

Web 2.0 is all about social networking. Get as many eyeballs looking at your content and people will pay to place ads in front of those eyeballs. This article predicts that web based advertising will eclipse Newspaper advertising in 2011. Now agreed, 2011 is a long way off, but the trend is there.

Web 1.0 was all about expectations. There was no empirical data to be analyzed - only sales pitches. By contrast, today's sites easily measure page views, provide click trails and a whole host of information which can be analyzed to help determine online advertising effectiveness.

There may be some web company acquisition activity that on the surface, makes no sense to the average bystander. Some deals will fail and some will be successful - just like in the "real" world.

I think for the most part, rational market dynamics are in play and that there isn't any Web 2.0 bubble to burst.

Business done with clicks are subject to the same market dynamics as business done with bricks. They're one and the the same. Let's stop talking about them as if they were distant cousins.

What's the Blogging Equivalent of "Phoning It In?"

As regular readers of this blog know, I'm a big fan of Seth Godin. His ideas about Permission Marketing are tremendous. I have an RSS subscription to his blog. I eagerly await his next postings.

Recently I've been a little disappointed. Today's topic talks about the two best ways to make money blogging.

In short, the answers are:
1. Develop a readership (which doesn't really make you money, although you could use AdSense to make marginal revenue through ad views).
2. Sell something.

He then links to a blog that details how combining your blog with e-commerce makes good sense.

Am I missing something?

The combination of competence, consistency, expertise, credibility, trust and a product/service offering that fulfills a demand has been the foundation of great business since the beginning of time. Whether you "lead" with expertise or "lead" with a great product/service is irrelevant.

It's like debating whether to start a long walk with your right leg or your left leg. It doesn't matter. You need them both. (Unless you plan to hop!)

You know what I call an e-commerce site without the requisite "company personality", credibility, industry expertise, customer relationships and additional product/service information?

I call it a vending machine.

You know what I call someone who builds up a level of trust, credibility and rapport with his/her audience, then delivers no goods or services whatsoever?

I call them politicians.

I know it's tough sitting in front of a blank screen, thinking about your next blog topic. But I'd rather not post, than be lame. Hopefully, I'm just missing the point of Seth's post.

Tell a Thousand People

Our neighbor, Laura, dropped by last evening. Our Friday night ritual is to lounge in our screened porch and discuss the week's events over a glass (or two) of our favorite beverages.

This week Laura had yet another bad customer service experience at our local gas station. She had filled up her car and purchased a carwash at the pump. The driveway to the carwash is tucked neatly behind the gas station - a one way single lane strip of pavement leading to the carwash. Once you're in line, you're in line.

Upon arriving at the kiosk where you enter the carwash code, she realized that the receipt had misprinted and did not include her code. The keypad has no facility to call into the station to report any problems, so she had to back down the narrow entrance way, park outside the station and enter the store to talk to a clerk.

And then things turned ugly.

Despite the fact that her credit card receipt showed her gas purchase and her carwash purchase, the clerk refused to give her a carwash code, stating that her card wasn't charged for the carwash. He said she could purchase a carwash for $6. (Even more insulting, since a car wash only costs $5 when you fill up!) After several minutes more of heated debate, she had to leave the station, already late for a business meeting - without her carwash.

Now, I'm sure that some unscrupulous customers try to scam free car washes from time to time - but I'm guessing that they typically don't do it after putting $45 dollars worth of premium gas in their Porsche.

So the gas station "won" that round.

Or had they?

Laura is a consultant who handles community outreach communications for major metropolitan construction efforts, like big highway construction projects and major sports venue construction. She's very good at her job and she knows everyone.

Before leaving the gas station parking lot, she placed a call to the Better Business Bureau and reported her complaint. And then she decided to make it her personal mission to tell one thousand people about how lousy our local gas station is.

The old adage is that an unsatisfied customer will tell ten people about their experience. Laura is raising the bar.

2 down. 998 to go.

I.T. Lesson for General Management

In this Network World article, IBM reintroduces the oldest I.T. cost containment trick in the book - consolidation.

By collapsing literally thousands of servers onto a dozen or so mainframes, they are planning on saving hundreds of millions of dollars. They'll also improve manageability, security, energy and capital costs by eliminating all those redundantly powered, air conditioned data centers.

In a former life, my team was able to do the same thing - eliminating six data centers and collapsing all our applications onto a single set of (iSeries) servers. The (internal I.T.) results were dramatic. Instead of six AS400 administrators, I needed only one (and a backup). PTF (Operating systems patches) maintenance became simple and straightforward. Management of the machines became predictable. Capacity planning and performance tuning was simplified. We were able to highly train the iSeries administrators, so they became experts.

If you are a small to mid sized business, ask your I.T. folks to take a look at how many servers you have and where they're located. Chances are, you'll discover an opportunity to simplify your infrastructure and reduce your costs and improve systems management, through co-location and consolidation.