Entrepreneurs Get Better with Age

by Whitney Johnson 

When my mother turned forty, we threw her a tongue-in-cheek funeral-themed surprise party, festooning the living room with paper tombstones engraved with Rest in Peace. That party theme is now a laughable conceit — forty then was older than forty now. Almost. In today's world, there is still a bias against older people — employers in particular often think (in their mind) what Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary is fond of saying to entrepreneurs he doesn't like, "You are dead to me." If we're being honest, we probably agree with O'Leary. Who of us hasn't said, "I'm looking for someone young and hungry." The implication is clear: If you aren't young, you have nothing to contribute.

According to famed developmental psychologist Erik Erikson, as we grow older, hunger for meaning animates us, making us more alive. His theory explains that each healthy human passes through eight stages of development from infancy to adulthood. The seventh stage of development typically takes places between the ages 40-64 and centers around generativity, a period not of stagnation, but of productivity and creativity, including a strong commitment to mentoring and shoring up the next generation. Individuals in this developmental stage are supremely motivated to generate value, not just for themselves, but for others, asking the question: What can I do to make my life really count? 

There are loads of both anecdotal and empirical data to support this idea of accelerating creativity in our middle years. Take Cheryl Kellond, for example, one of forty women we recently profiled in 40 Women Over 40 to Watch. Kellond, 43, founded Bia Sport, a GPS sports watch that records time, current heart rate, sending the data straight to an online profile. It also comes with a panic button that gives women who work out alone peace of mind. With traditional sources of financing unavailable, Kellond raised her first round of capital ($408,000) on Kickstarter — the ultimate in creative financing. Then there's Linda Avey, who at age 46 started breakout company 23 and Me, a direct-to-consumer company that gives people access to their genetic data. At age 53, Avey is on her second start-up, Curious, a tool that gives people tools to ask questions about their health through data aggregation and sharing.

 Research suggests Kellond and Avey aren't one-offs. "The average age of a successful entrepreneur in high-growth industries such as computers, health care, and aerospace is 40. Twice as many successful entrepreneurs are over 50 as under 25. The vast majority — 75 percent — have more than six years of industry experience and half have more than 10 years when they create their startup," says Duke University scholar Vivek Wadhwa, who studied 549 successful technology ventures. Meanwhile, data from the Kauffman Foundation indicates the highest rate of entrepreneurship in America has shifted to the 55-64 age group, with people over 55 almost twice as likely to found successful companies than those between 20 and 34.

The over-40 crowd is also more likely to do work that matters not just for themselves, but also future generations. For example, Jacki Zehner, 47, the youngest woman to become a partner at Goldman Sachs, is pouring her post-forty life into philanthropy on behalf of women and girls as CEO of Women Moving Millions. Carol Fox, 69, has devoted her golden years to the China-U.S. Philanthropy project, teaching Chinese billionaires how to extend their circle of caring beyond family. While photojournalist Paola Gianturco, 73, igniting an activist grandmother movement, inspiring grandmothers across the world to become involved in education, health and human rights. In learning about these inspiring individuals, it's easy to see why research indicates that a 55-year-old and even a 65-year-old have more innovation potential than a 25-year-old: innovators really do get better with age.

Just as larger businesses provide economic stability to society in the form of higher pay, better medical care, and retirement, experienced workers provide intellectual and emotional ballast in the workplace including innovation expertise. Think about it — disruptive innovation is about playing where no one wants to play (low-end), or has thought of playing (new market). As individuals move into Erikson's seventh developmental stage, creating something new isn't just a "nice thing to do" — it is a psychological imperative. The urge to create, to generate a life that counts impels people to innovate, even when it's lonely and scary. Data notwithstanding, some of the companies among us will continue allow these individuals to fall into the arms of independent work, if we don't give them the boot first. The smart companies — and my money is on you — will harness this hunger of the underserved, ready-to-serve corp of talent, and upend the competition. 

Whitney Johnson

Whitney Johnson is a co-founder of Rose Park Advisors, Clayton Christensen's investment firm, and the author of Dare-Dream-Do: Remarkable Things Happen When You Dare to Dream (Bibliomotion, 2012). Ms. Johnson is available for speaking and consulting. 

How to make your business more attractive for sale

JACOLINE LOEWEN

The Globe and Mail

Published Tuesday, Jun. 25 2013, 5:00 AM EDT
Last updated Monday, Jun. 24 2013, 2:44 PM EDT

The dismal financial results for 2009 no longer need to be included in a company’s books. For any business looking to sell, this significant milestone allows for a marked improvement when potential buyers look at the performance of the past three years. The conversation doesn’t have to start with: “We looked at your financial statements. What happened in ’09? Want to talk about that first?”

That said, there is still a noticeable gap in valuation expectations between buyers and sellers. “The market downturn stripped out the profits for private companies and the survivors reduced and reinvented their businesses to add to their top line,” says Bob Gorrie, owner of Gorrie Marketing Services. “These owners have put a great deal of sweat equity into their businesses, and unfortunately that extra hard work and planning is not reflected in their financial results.”

But as the markets improve, profits are returning and owners interested in selling are watching their industry cycles like hawks for the upswing, waiting to get the timing right. A more relevant question for these owners is “where is my own business in its life cycle?”

For any business owner contemplating a sale in the next few years, here are a few ways to add to the valuation:

Does your business have solid management?
The owner may be leaving but buyers want to know whether there’s a team in place with big goals to drive the business forward with equal determination. Having a succession plan is critical, but when Crosbie & Co. recently conducted an owners’ survey, it revealed that fewer than 5 per cent have a written document with a strong operator or family member ready to take over. Owner-operators have built their lives around running their businesses and they do not want to let that go. This reluctance may prevent them from seeing the importance of planning for their own exit and they will get dinged on their company sale price for this omission.

Are your key processes institutionalized?
“There is the risk that the company incurs a fatal loss of knowledge and connections upon the exit of the owner,” the president of a manufacturing business told me. “The earn-out helps, but two to three years does not make up for 30 years experience in a company. One way to mitigate this risk is to bring in a guy like me.” Paying a high-quality CEO for a few years will help the owner of a windows manufacturer convert “in the head” knowledge to written processes. “We preserved the knowledge and demonstrated the existence of a reliable management team to a potential buyer,” the president added.

Do you know good buyers?
The sale price of a business is what buyers offer and when a company is in the growth part of its business cycle, there will be multiple offers and phone calls from all sorts of interested parties. “I know the ‘I’m comfortable with my business’ owners where the offers to buy have made great sense,” says succession planning coach Janice Lahiti. “The owners don’t do it because they think their ability to influence a variety of broader agendas will diminish.” As the business hits the mature stage of its life cycle, which often occurs in tandem with the owner’s life cycle, suddenly the pool of multiple bidders dries up and as Janice says: “The owner can no longer command the multiples they want.”

The owner may also miss the opportunity to sell to a buyer who will structure the sale so that the majority of the company is purchased but the owner can keep 20 per cent to 30 per cent with a fixed medium-term buyout schedule. They can also have limited management or board involvement. This structure keeps the owner involved mentally and financially in his or her ‘baby’ while taking some money off the table to free up time to pursue other interests.

What is your opportunity cost, really?
Melanie Kau exited her successful family business, Mobilia, to take on the challenge of running Le Naturiste. “The ‘what next’ after you have worked for 15 to 20 years in a business prevents people from asking themselves the cost of staying where they are because they are comfortable. I know what that feels like because I have just been through it. Therein lies a great deal of value with the experience the entrepreneur has built up: sometimes the business is more like a cage than a platform.”

Jacoline Loewen is a director at Crosbie, which focuses on succession advice for family businesses and closely held small to medium-sized enterprises. Crosbie develops customized strategies, particularly in relation to M&A, financing and corporate strategy matters. Ms. Loewen is also the author of Money Magnet: How to Attract Investors to Your Business. You can follow her on Twitter @jacolineloewen.

Use Your Own Judgment -- Really!

Judgment, writes Schumpeter, the business columnist for The Economist, “is too often missing from leadership studies.” The reason is that it is a topic too hard to quantify with metrics but as the Schumpeter column notes, “[J]udgment is what matters most.” Judgment serves as a kind of equilibrium device that prevents us from getting too carried away with our ideas or ourselves.

Lack of judgment sadly is not only missing from leadership literature, it is also missing from our organizations. The reasons are plentiful but it may come down to a combination of two factors: one, as Schumpeter cited, the desire to be “scientific” (and quantifiable); and two, the failure of executive to trust their own instincts. The former is understandable because management requires individuals to make decisions based on empirical data rather than their gut reactions. As a result, managers learn to favor data over instinct.

Broadly speaking, arguing with the facts makes good sense. Few managers will get in trouble by arguing a business case. It is what they are taught in school as well as schooled by their supervisors as they rise through the ranks. The problem is that too much reliance on the facts can lead one up a blind alley, especially when the assumptions that generate the facts are faulty.

So what can organizations do to promote judgment? The most obvious measure would be to challenge people to think for themselves rather then recite facts. As Colin Powell once noted, “Experts often possess more data than judgment.” Sadly, as Secretary of State in the George W. Bush administration, Powell learned the limitations of data when he was persuaded to argue the case to the United Nations for the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

With the benefit of hindsight, we know now that while intelligence sources argued that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that data was based upon faulty assumptions. The source of the information we learned later came from an Iraqi informant, code named “Curveball,” who was feeding Western intelligence false information.

Judgment is the ability to discern fact from fiction, but moreover it is the ability to look at a situation not simply as a series of data points but to put those data points into context. For example, when developing a business case, a manager needs to evaluate customer needs against a myriad of factors that include customer demand, competition and the economic climate. A look at the data may say one thing, but a conversation with a customer says another. That is, your company could develop a product but customers may not be interested in it because they are happy with what they have and see no need to switch vendors.

Judgment then becomes the lever that a manager employs to argue for making investments in a new product that provide a noticeable difference for consumers. Or conversely judgment becomes the tool that same manager, or his more senior manager, uses to argue against investing in the new product because the investment will not be worth it.

Judgment is critical for success so managers need to trust their instincts as well as well as the facts they evaluate.

John Baldoni,

10 SIMPLE B2B Content Marketing Tips for COMPLEX Solutions

Take the Einstein Approach to Simplification

 

It’s true that compared with B2C, the B2B marketer doesn’t have it quite that easy when it comes to connecting and engaging with their target audience. The B2B lead generation process for one typically follows the 15-60-25 rule. Only 15% of the leads you engage with qualify as “right-time-right-place”—so they may choose to buy based on their strong inclination.  60% of leads fall within the nurturing phase—so these will get filtered through your sales funnel. 25% are not interested at all. Savvy marketers know that you have to qualify your leads no matter what and attempt to convert that 15% top layer before reaching out to the remaining 60%.

In addition, the B2B sales cycle itself is complex. There are too many gatekeepers, multiple influencers and a mix of decision makers…not all of whom work cohesively and in tandem with each other. With sales and marketing departments working in silos in a majority of the B2B organizations, there are far too many cracks and holes in the lead nurturing process. Many good quality leads are lost as a result.

One thing is for sure, every B2B company today realizes that content marketing is an integral part of their demand generation and marketing strategy. But content marketing is not easy—even the first step, content creation, is a challenge. One of the most common reasons cited by B2B organizations for wanting to create content in-house is: “Our business and solutions are too complex to explain, so we cannot outsource content marketing.” And that is just the point I’d like you to think about as you read this—if your communications do not help prospects understand very simply how you can resolve their challenges, your “solutions” are just not the right solution!

As one of the greatest scientists, Einstein said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”  (Tweet this!)   
         
Let’s take a cue from how simply this scientific genius explained the concept of relativity—“ When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.” There are volumes written on this cornerstone of modern physics, but in one simple sentence, Einstein made things clear to even the most scientifically challenged individuals. What can we learn from this? The most important takeaway in my opinion is the lesson that no matter how complex and complicated your product or service may be, there is a way to simplify it and present it to your customers in a compelling way. 

B2B Content Marketing Simplified – In 10 Easy Steps
There is a movement currently on in the United States—a movement to make simplicity, clarity, empathy and transparency a national priority. Watch the man behind this mission, brand guru Alan Siegel present this movement to simplify communications by the government. The corporate world also needs to rally their forces to meet buyer demand for simplified communications. How can corporations afford to complicate matters for their buyers when even government is starting to communicate in a simple, effective manner?


Here are 10 quick tips to simplify your B2B content and make it shareable, make it compelling, make it sell and make it stick:

1. Speak from your customer’s point of view: Yes, you know your product and want to tell your prospects everything that’s great about it. But here’s the thing—they don’t care. What they care about is whether you understand their pain points and have a real solution to their problems. Your B2B content should focus less on your product or service and more on how it solves buyers’ problems faster, better and more accurately than your competitors’. That’s when your demand generation will experience acceleration in the right direction. Download a free copy of The ALEA Demand Generation Playbook to further help your efforts.
2. Talk less, listen more, and act even more: Social networks facilitate this today better than many other mediums can. Rather than getting carried away with a continuous blast of information, listen to what buyers are discussing on social forums. Then act upon what they are seeking and deliver as efficiently and as quickly as you can. Know that a proactively written blog post, email piece or landing page that addresses an active discussion in your target group is better than a 15 page whitepaper that takes 3 months to write.
3. Use language your audience speaks—save the tech-speak for your in-house geek squad: If your buyers understood all the technical and technological aspects of your business solution, they would likely build it themselves. After all, they really know their business much better than you do. When they show interest in the solution you have to offer, they want it explained in simple terms using the language of business.
4. Avoid condescension—but remember that simplification does not mean talking down: Your audience is not made up of dummies! I talked a while ago about my visit to Chef Bocuse’s restaurant in Lyon. If you look at his cuisine, he’s been doing the same thing for years and yet is revered as a master—the chef of the century.  His dishes are neither too simple, nor too fancy—just perfectly balanced to bring out the best in each ingredient that goes in to make delectable, classic fare. Even the way he presents his cuisine is masterful; there is no clutter and hodge-podge but everything is strategically placed and each element of the dish has a clear and simple function. What can we emulate from Chef Bocuse and his inimitable style of classic French cuisine? How can we make our B2B content so compelling, delightful and valuable that our audience wants to keep coming back for more? The answer is simplicity.
5. Keeping checking on levels of understanding throughout the process: Ask buyers to explain your product/service in their own words; this can be immensely useful. You may be shocked to find out that their interpretation of what you thought you were communicating quite simply is far from what it should be. You may also be pleasantly surprised to hear their matter-of-fact, solution-based summary of what your product means to them. Either way, you will have much to learn.
6. Highlight benefits to show value—features are mere factual details: Try as we might, many of us continue to confuse features with benefits. What we need to communicate is exactly how each feature of our product or service translates into a real, tangible benefit for our customers. Even a simple news story like your company launching a user blog can be communicated as a benefit—“We are delighted that you can now connect with us in a direct, straight-forward manner through our blog. This is your forum—we want to hear from you.” But instead, many of us will announce this news by saying something like, “Our corporate blog is the latest feature of our online properties. It will be updated daily in order to share news, views and industry insights…blah, blah, blah” Do you think your customers care? They don’t.
7. Find examples and analogies in your prospects’ life so they can relate: You can wax eloquent about your storage virtualization solution, but your customers won’t understand it unless you bring it into their everyday lives. Talk to them about a cluttered office and how difficult it becomes when you pack boxes of your data files over the years without proper signage. They will relate to the loss of time, endless effort and falling levels of productivity. They will see clearly that you can save their time and money, minimize effort and enhance productivity.
8. Build on existing strengths of your solutions to show expanded capabilities / enhancements: You don’t always have to start all over. If your target audience already recognizes certain unique elements that make your product and brand stand out, the best thing you can do is reinforce those strengths and build on them to show progression and enhancement. Emphasize the fact that a solution that has served them well over the years is now even better, even more powerful.
9. Speak to a list of implicit issues that buyers have on their mind—it makes them feel connected: We often assume that buyers already know what their concerns and issues are and so we don’t need to remind them. The fact is, they want to hear it from you. They want to know that you are cognizant of the issues they face and are continuously innovating to help them meet those challenges.
10. Demonstrate ROI and how it can be measured: Simple by no means is simplistic. You can’t leave it to your buyers’ imagination to figure out the ROI your solution will deliver. Yes, you need to strike a balance, remain, elegant and classy and use all that sophistication which makes for valuable, cut-above-the-rest communication. But you can define and spell out the ROI for your buyers and show them how to measure it. That’s when you show them real value.

About the author: Louis Foong View all posts by Louis Foong

Louis Foong is the founder and CEO of The ALEA Group Inc, one of North America’s most innovative B2B demand generation specialists. As a thought leader with more than three decades of experience in the field, Louis guides his team and ALEA’s clients through the dynamic, evolving lead generation landscape. His astute sense of marketing and sales along with a clear vision and ability to see the “big picture” has proved beneficial to numerous organizations, both small and large. With the right advice and a slew of result-driven services, he enables clients to gain maximum return on investment for their lead generation efforts. His clients include companies in the technology, telecommunications, software, healthcare and professional services industries. Prior to starting the ALEA Group, Louis Foong has held various senior executive positions within corporate America. Today he is known and well-respected as a thought leader and pioneer in this industry. Foong is a published blogger and among the top authors on CustomerThink, a global online community of business leaders.

Women who contributed to computing innovation

5 Keys to Inspiring Leadership, No Matter Your Style

Forget the stereotypical leadership image of a buttoned-up person in a gray suit hauling around a hefty briefcase. Today, standout leaders come in all shapes and sizes. She could be a blue jeans-clad marketing student, running a major ecommerce company out of her dorm room. He might be the next salt-and-pepper-haired, barefoot Steve Jobs, presenting a groundbreaking new device at a major industry conference.

"Our research indicates that what really matters is that leaders are able to create enthusiasm, empower their people, instill confidence and be inspiring to the people around them," says Peter Handal, chief executive of New York City-based Dale Carnegie Training, a leadership-training company.

That's a tall order. However, as different as leaders are today, there are some things great leaders do every day. Here, Handal shares his five keys for effective leadership: 

1. Face challenges.

Great leaders are brave enough to face up to challenging situations and deal with them honestly. Whether it's steering through a business downturn or getting struggling employees back on track, effective leaders meet these challenges openly. Regular communications with your staff, informing them of both good news and how the company is reacting to challenges will go a long way toward making employees feel like you trust them and that they're unlikely to be hit with unpleasant surprises.

"The gossip at the coffee machine is usually 10 times worse than reality," Handal says. "Employees need to see their leaders out there, confronting that reality head-on." 

2. Win trust.

Employees are more loyal and enthusiastic when they work in an environment run by people they trust. Building that trust can be done in many ways. The first is to show employees that you care about them, Handal says. Take an interest in your employees beyond the workplace. Don't pry, he advises, but ask about an employee's child's baseball game or college graduation. Let your employees know that you're interested in their success and discuss their career paths with them regularly.

When employees, vendors or others make mistakes, don't reprimand or correct them in anger. Instead, calmly explain the situation and why their behavior or actions weren't correct, as well as what you expect in the future. When people know that you aren't going to berate them and that you have their best interests at heart, they're going to trust you, Handal says. 

3. Be authentic.

If you're not a suit, don't try to be one. Employees and others dealing with your company will be able to tell if you're just pretending to be someone you're not, Handal says. That could make them question what else about you might be inauthentic. Have a passion for funky shoes? Wear them. Are you an enthusiastic and hilarious presenter? Get them laughing. Use your strengths and personality traits to develop your personal leadership style, Handal says. 

4. Earn respect.

When you conduct yourself in an ethical way and model the traits you want to see in others, you earn the respect of those around you. Leaders who are perceived as not "walking their talk" typically don't get very far, Handal says. This contributes to employees and other stakeholders having pride in the company, which is an essential part of engagement, Handal says. Also, customers are less likely to do business with a company if they don't respect its values or leadership. 

5. Stay curious.

Good leaders remain intellectually curious and committed to learning. They're inquisitive and always looking for new ideas, insights and information. Handal says the best leaders understand that innovation and new approaches can come from many places and are always on the lookout for knowledge or people who might inform them and give them an advantage.

"The most successful leaders I know are truly very curious people. They're interested in the things around them and that contributes to their vision," Handal says.

Gwen Moran

Gwen Moran is a freelance writer and co-author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Business Plans (Alpha, 2010).

5 Ways to Make Your Product Sell Itself

We are creatures of habit. American families, on average, buy the same 150 products over and over again, which make up 85 percent of their household needs, according to research out of Harvard Business School. So how can you get people to take a chance on your new business and become loyal customers?

The trick is helping customers overcome their initial hesitation and making your new item speak to customers in a relatable way.

Here are five ways to help your product sell itself in a crowded marketplace:
1. Broadcast your advantage. What makes you better than everyone else in the industry? Be clear with customers from the start. Perceived advantage is built on factors like greater prestige, more convenience, superior effectiveness or better value for the money.

Even cleaning products, the most mundane of all consumer necessities, can win using this theory. For example, Mr. Clean Magic Erasers solved the problems that previous spray-on liquid cleaners claimed to, with the added advantage of not damaging the paint on walls as competitors' products did. The brand made this ability to remove touch marks without damaging walls clear through a TV ad campaign that demonstrated the product at work. This provided positive reinforcement to consumers before they made their purchase.

2. Fit into your customer's routine. How much effort is required for customers to make the transition from a current product to yours? If the cost is more than its relative advantage, most people won't try the new product. Febreze seems like one of those success stories -- and it is -- but even P&G can make mistakes with their branding, as was the case with Febreze Scentstories. In 2004, the company launched a $5.99 scent "player" that was reminiscent of a CD player with five scent discs that changed every half hour. Consumers were confused. They couldn't tell if the product played music, freshened air or did both. Not knowing how or why they would use it, they didn't.

3. Work right out of the box. When building new products, don't add work for the buyer. Make your product work as intended the first time out and every time thereafter. A kink-free garden hose, for example, should be kink free the first time and the hundredth time; a children's toy should be easy to assemble; and you should never expect a busy mom to spend more than five minutes figuring out how to use a new slow-cooker. 

4. Make benefits easy to spot. The more evident the perceived advantages, the more your product will market itself. For example, the clear plastic packaging of 3M's Command line of removable hooks allows you to see and understand how the product enables you to hang and remove a hook without leaving a hole in the wall.

5. Let customers try it out. Tea bags were first used as giveaways so that people could sample tea without buying large tins, vastly improving the "trial-ability" of brewed tea, and eventually tea bags. Samples, giveaways and store demonstrations are tried-and-true techniques for risk-free experimentation. If you can't afford to give your product away, offer a tempting discount or "buy one get one" deal. Depending on your product and core customer, you can use sites like Gilt.com or Travel Zoo to make enticing offers.

Local products or services benefit from actual social interaction: an informal gathering in a home where guests can "play" with the product or try the service, a farmer's or open-air market where consumers can touch and taste what you're selling and meet you. The easier something is to try, the faster customers will want to buy it.

Debra Kaye

Debra Kaye is a brand and culture strategist and partner at Lucule, a New York-based innovation consulting firm. She is author of the book, Red Thread Thinking (McGraw-Hill, 2013).

The Four Questions Great Leaders Ask

“Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.”

—Voltaire

Ever notice how great leaders ask the best questions?

A masterful leader will sit Yoda-like in a meeting, listening intently to the dialogue and then, with Zen Master timing, ask a question that will change the tenor, the focus and the performance of the entire team impressive.

 .

Seeing a seasoned leader ask questions is like watching a great musician or athlete who just seems to know what note to play or what play to call. In my opinion, this rare ability is the performance art of business.

I aspire to be this kind of leader and hope that with age and experience, I will eventually have the wisdom and timing to use less oxygen and get greater results.

(As my mother used to explain—often, I am afraid—God isn’t finished with me yet.)

From my experience, many of the best questions revolve around the following themes. My hope is that by asking these questions of yourself and your team, you get the outcome you want and your people get the leadership they need.

Question 1: Is this urgent or essential?
Urgent matters have a way of getting in the way of the essential. For example, you and your team checking emails first thing in the morning may feel essential but in reality, it may not even be that important. There is a growing school of thought—one that I endorse—that if you start each day by knocking off one or two of the most essential things on your list (before the urgent matters get in the way), you’ll be successful. As a leader, setting the context around what’s super important versus what feels important at the time is a great thing to question.

Question 2: What should you stop doing?
In order to have time to focus on the essential, you must eliminate the less important and distracting activities that occupy your time. Does your team have a “stop doing” list? Helping people become aware of what they might stop doing first will allow them more time and energy to focus on the essential “to-do” list.

Question 3: What makes you feel strongest?
Here’s a well-kept secret: Great leaders know what they suck at. More important, they know how to find working partners with superhero powers that disguise this suckiness through masterful delegation, thus giving them time and energy to focus on their strengths. Just because you can manage a project, drive the P&L, come up with the new marketing hook, and recruit good people doesn’t mean you are passionate and, for that reason, have the potential to be great at all of the above. If your friends or teammates think they are good at everything, lack of awareness and/or humility will conspire to keep them from being outstanding. Asking questions that help focus them on their passions and strengths is a gift that keeps giving.

Question 4: What might we be missing? 
Great leaders are open to the fact (and it is a fact) that they are missing something—be it in new service offerings, make up of the senior leadership team, or “simply” in the assumptions they are making about the competitive environment. Pressing the team to consider what WE might be missing demonstrates humility, awareness and openness to possibility. Wherever you find an innovative culture, you find leaders asking this question.

Extra Credit
The way you ask questions is critically important. By starting questions with “How to” or “I wish” and finishing them with the challenge that you can’t figure out, e.g., “I wish I knew how to get this idea through our legal hurdles,” you are modeling great leadership. Why? Because great leaders humbly share their biggest challenges with their teams and ask them to help solve them.

 

Mike Maddock, 

"In times of change, the learners will inherit the earth

The learned will be well equipped to deal in a world which no longer exists."...Teacher

5 Principles of Convergence: How To Work Better At The Intersection Of Tech, Creativity, And Media

Convergence is both buzzword and marketing reality. Razorfish CEO Bob Lord outlines 5 ways creative companies can adapt to a converging world and create better brand experiences. 

The word convergence has been picking up steam in the marketing world. It may even be the “big data” term of 2013. Yet, the word means different things to different people. At Razorfish, we use convergence to describe the coming together of three irresistible forces--media, technology, and creativity--to create experiences that enrich the consumer’s relationship with the brand.

Convergence is a constant process, not an end point. Technology, creativity, and media are constantly evolving, and so is the converged company. It is a never-ending challenge to adapt a customer experience that, in our digital age, will always be in flux. Too often, businesses are far behind consumers in embracing technological change, a problem that has everything to do with how the organization is set up. My new book, coauthored with Razorfish Global CTO Ray Velez, Converge: Transforming Business at the Intersection of Marketing and Technology, describes in detail how enterprises and teams must adapt for an age of disruption.

Here are five key principles: 

Put the Customer at the Center.

Being ready for convergence isn’t about building an innovations lab, spending marketing budget on Facebook and Twitter ads or about hiring a social media “guru” to respond to online complaints. It’s about embracing a customer-centric mind-set and making your entire organization responsive to the customer journey. This isn’t as easy as it sounds, especially for larger, well-established companies where scale has mandated the creation of a complicated organizational chart.

Strategies need to be based on data from actual consumer activity, not abstract gut feeling. That data should dictate not only what experiences you serve consumers but where, when, and how. Brand communications must engage the consumer in social platforms and ecosystems and open APIs. And the retail experience must be made omni-channel, giving shoppers the same experience whether they’re in-store, online, or on the phone. 

Think of Your Brand as a Service and Experience.
You’re no longer in the business of selling stuff; you’re filling consumers’ needs. As a marketer, you’re creating new products and apps and always-on ecosystems, not just a series of campaigns based around a calendar of product launches. Nike is the classic example, with its ecosystem of fitness apparel, gadgets like FuelBand and services like Nike+ that immerse the user in the company’s innovation and create an end-to-end fitness solution. Special K, one of our clients, is still in the cereal game and it sells a ton of it. But it’s also in the health, fitness, and weight-loss games. It took its Special K challenge and turned it into a digital weight-loss platform.

To create and maintain this ecosystem, you’ll be investing in marketing operations, not just working media, and bringing in more designers and developers. In the past, marketing ops were largely limited to the maintenance of an internal marketing team and hiring and firing agencies that produced the creative work. People were accountable for spending the dollars, not how effectively they were spent. In a converged world, it will be about those activities, and also about investing in people and systems to ensure that the marketing spending is optimized. 

Reject Silos.
Media, technology, and creativity are no longer discrete problems. Let’s take the most fundamental example of this: the creation of an ad. A few years back, a new ad campaign was simply a creative challenge that was solved by coming up with a new flight of TV spots. These days, a new ad will likely involve some technological and media challenges. Are you tapping into the API of a hot new social media platform? How are you getting your brilliant campaign in front of a demographic that’s no longer watching TV?

The traditional, silo-based organization is ill-equipped to answer these questions. So what you need to achieve is better collaboration between marketing and IT. To get there, your C-suite might have senior roles like chief digital officer and chief marketing technologists, filled by experts in both functions catalyzing innovation throughout the organization and fostering collaboration. Or you might try bottom-up solutions like internal account management. In this structure, marketing folks have counterparts in IT and vice versa. 

Act Like a Startup.
There’s a set of common misconceptions about how established enterprises should learn from startups. It’s not about moving into flashy new digs or setting up Ping-Pong tables or having free sushi for lunch.

Like customer-centricity, the startup mentality requires much deeper and more meaningful change. It requires uprooting many old assumptions and habits, especially those around tech infrastructure, and doing things the way a newer, leaner company might.

Acting like a startup in this sense means the following:

--Your enterprise deploys--or at least experiments with--cheap, fast, and flexible tools like cloud computing, social media platforms, and open APIs.

--You employ product managers who are accountable for particular aspects of the consumer experience, just like Facebook has tasked someone with oversight of the newsfeed. As one of our clients describes it, product managers have to understand the customer and constantly prioritize and re-prioritize what’s best for the customer.

--You employ Agile methodology and rapid prototyping.
And look, no Ping-Pong.

Embrace Diversity
Every organization needs specialists and experts, but in the place of environments where everyone fills one role and thinks about nothing besides that role, there needs to be cross-fertilization, a coming together of various fields, disciplines, personalities, and cultures.

In practice, it’s important to get a wide variety of expertise and perspectives around the table—marketing and technology, of course, but also HR, legal, and finance. We call this building a big boat, and it’s vital to building a convergence-ready organization.

But there’s more to it than just getting all the right people around the table. You also have to incentivize collaboration, getting multiple functions to rally around a shared set of objectives and a shared method of measuring process--that’s a big change and it has to be tracked cleanly and carefully. This entails getting your systems to feed a dashboard that tracks a manageable set of metrics. Then you have to get the team to check in regularly, or at least pay attention to the readouts they’re receiving.

Adapting your organization for convergence is never over. It’s a constant cycle of testing, learning, building, and destroying. All the more reason you should start now. The winners of this era will be the companies whose main focus is constantly improving on the customer journey. If you follow your customer, you can’t go wrong.

By:  Bob Lord, Global CEO of Razorfish.

The Company Website Is Making a Comeback

For years now, companies have been vying for attention on social streams controlled by the likes of Facebook and Twitter. Hundreds of millions of people flocked to those streams, and corporations figured they had to follow. But now businesses are realizing something has been lost in the transition, that there’s nothing like being able to control exactly how they speak to customers, and the humble website seems to be surging back.

The comeback is bolstered by new interlinks that make it increasingly easy for websites to suck in and selectively repurpose some of the very social content that diminished the open web in the first place. These tools are typically used to highlight particularly interesting online conversations, to aggregate responses to a question posed by a consumer goods seller or media organization, or to facilitate question and answer sessions. So while the content comes from social streams controlled by outside companies like Facebook, it’s reshuffled and re-prioritized in a way that makes sense to the owner of the website.

This allows companies with products to sell to pull off a neat trick: Captivating potential customers by talking about those potential customers, rather than about the product. Everyone likes to hear about themselves. This means that, as cheesy as it might sound, Twitter and Facebook users get an ego boost on seeing their opinions, words, and even faces reflected on a corporate website, even if it’s through a silly contest, poll, or roundup.

“What we do is what I call marketing with a mirror – we hold the mirror up to the audience and they respond to it,” says Sam Decker, whose company Mass Relevance helps companies like Patagonia and HBO sift and repurpose social streams on their own websites. “You know when the camera in the football stadium shines on some people, and they stand up and say, ‘look at me, look at me?’ You just got engagement and participation. And that’s exactly what we’re doing, we’re playing back their own participation in the brand experience. That’s what you can do with owned media, with a website.

Decker says Mass Relevance has grown to 100 employees and 300 clients, doubling its business in the past year. It is riding the same wave as RebelMouse, a New York startup that helps media companies like Time Inc. and Fox and retail partners like Shopify repurpose social data on their own websites. CEO Paul Berry, formerly the Huffington Post’s chief technical officer, says he started the company last year because friends in the media business were constantly asking him to help better showcase fast breaking news from social streams on the websites that generated their advertising revenue.

Now the company is launching an ad product that does the same thing for advertisers, helping them place their Facebook and Twitter posts on other people’s websites, for a price. Those advertisers have been pouring effort into their Twitter and Facebook streams, only to realize it’s not been earning them much return, driving neither traffic nor sales.

“Company blogs and websites are missing their own best stuff,” Berry says. “The people who actually care about you are the ones who come to your site.” 

And with the right content, as fresh as a status update but polished like a magazine ad, those hard-core customers might return again and again.



RebelMouse CEO Paul Berry. Photo: RebelMouse

Secrets to Lasting Success as an Entrepreneur

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Successful people will often tell you that luck and hard work got them where they are. But under the surface, there's much more going on. People who rise to top of their fields have a lot in common. Learning what sets them apart can help you find lasting success in your own business.

Jeff Brown, a Harvard Medical School faculty psychologist and co-author of The Winner's Brain (DaCapo, 2010), studies highly successful people, looking at their brain activity and life stories for clues to what makes them unique.

Turns out, they think differently than those whose success peters out or never comes to pass. "People who are successful have learned to optimize their brains," Brown says.

He's uncovered strategies, which he calls "brain power tools," that successful people use to achieve their goals. Each tool is a way of thinking that affects your choices and actions as you work toward a goal. Taken together, they help you find opportunities, build mastery, work through failures and surpass the status quo.

Consider Brown's five keys to lasting success as outlined below. Give these tactics a try to reach your goals time and time again.

1. Create your own serendipity.

If you look at highly successful people, their road to greatness was full of twists and turns.

"Successful people take very circuitous paths," Brown says. "They have a real knack for recognizing nontraditional opportunities."

Rather than waiting in a long line of succession, look for paths that others haven't tried. Take on projects that add a unique skill to your toolkit, find ways to meet people you admire, or pitch yourself for opportunities that seem like an unexpected match. Don't be afraid to get creative. There are many ways to reach every destination.

2. Know what you bring to the table.

Successful people take inventory of their skills and abilities regularly, and they use that feedback to improve. "If they have a deficit, they want to know it," Brown says.

Ask mentors and coaches to assess your strengths and weaknesses, and measure your skills objectively if you can. Use that information to identify what to learn or practice so that you master strengths and bolster weak skills. And don't shy away from criticism out of fear or pride, Brown says. "That's the kiss of death when it comes to success."

3. Focus on a single end goal.

The ability to choose a goal and work toward it without getting distracted is a trademark among highly successful people. "They have laser focus, which boosts their ability to think and execute," Brown says.

Create a list of priorities and use them to select which opportunities to pursue. "Don't be duped by the illusion of missed opportunity where you think you have to do everything that comes your way," Brown says. "Lock onto your goal and don't get distracted."

4. Work at the edge of your comfort zone.

Risk is necessary if you want to truly excel, and successful people approach risk with a clear sense of how much they can handle. "They take moderate risks," Brown says. "They're out of their comfort zone but not going crazy."

Test your own boundaries by looking for risks that make you slightly uncomfortable but still more excited than anxious. "You have an optimal risk range that you have to learn to gauge and understand," Brown says. The more you experiment with taking risks, big and small, the easier it will be to find your sweet spot in the future.

5. Put your energy into the daily grind.

Successful people work tirelessly toward their goals. They're propelled by an internal energy that keeps them moving forward, even when they face setbacks or success seems far away. "They keep giving to the process and keep investing," Brown says. Their drive isn't pushy or demanding. It's persistent.

Rather than always looking ahead at the end goal, immerse yourself in the daily practice of building toward it. Learning to enjoy and embrace that process will help you develop the stamina and resilience you need to see it through. "You should enjoy the pursuit of success," Brown says. "The chase lasts much longer than the catch."

BY Nadia Goodman

Everything You Think About Business Leadership Is Changing

Quick. Picture a business leader.

The one that traditionally comes to mind is that of a Jack-Welchian type “taking the hill,” “gaining share,” “beating the competition,” “cutting losses,” operating through “command and control.” War, sports and gambling analogies abound.

In this world, size matters. And this has been in part because having many customers also meant having better insights into their behavior, a significant competitive advantage. (I recognized that the weekly client surveys we conducted at Merrill Lynch gave us a HUGE advantage over our wealth management competitors, who didn't have similar resources.) And even if large companies didn’t always really “listen to their customers,” as they’ve said they did, their sheer might and resources could often shape their industry in a certain direction, regardless. (“Any color as long as it’s black” worked back in the day.)

But this is changing. Technology and social media today are enabling almost anyone to tap into what consumers want… by simply asking. And these same resources are also allowing customers to “talk back” to companies, and in some cases to mobilize their reaction to company actions.

I've heard a number of thought leaders (like the super-smart Nilofer Merchant) point out that this dramatic shift of the “rules of engagement” with customers was exemplified by Bank of America’s debit card fee roll-out. It is clear that the bank did not fully engage with its customers on what they valued, or how they would react to the shift; the bank instead bet that its might as an industry leader would serve as a forcing mechanism, expecting competitors to fall in line. Negative customer reaction was swift and dramatic, in a way it couldn’t have been a decade ago, and the bank reversed course.

Thus, the prototypical leader of the future will shift from the steely-eyed command-and-control type to one who is more open to feedback….one who specializes in communication, collaboration and co-ordination.

I gained a first-hand preview of this when I led Smith Barney and Merrill Lynch. A number of leaders of those businesses over the years had approached the job with a “follow me” mentality… and the Financial Advisors just sat back and watched them with bemused smiles. By taking several months to engage them instead in a discussion of what they observed from clients, what was working, what wasn’t working, where we were spinning our wheels – and what our business strategy should be – we saved an enormous amount of time and resources, and had their buy-in on strategic moves. And I found that the great ideas were as likely (or more likely) to come from the 200th Advisor whose hand I shook at a get-together as from our strategic planning department.

While this approach may not lead to Steve-Jobs-type innovation, it can certainly help companies of all sizes understand what consumers value. Thus, the most successful CEOs of their future will view customers not in a paternalistic way (at best) or as sales targets, but instead as partners… whose buy-in to a course of action will be the key component of their success.

And, yes, this does make me more optimistic about the progress of women in business and the value we place on their leadership qualities.


(Photo: Flickr, mattcba) 
Posted by:
 Sallie Krawcheck

Why entrepreneurs need to get smarter, stronger and more global — fast

Photo by Ken LennoxTurkish born Hamdi Ulukaya, founder and CEO of U.S.-based Chobani Inc., was named the Ernst & Young World Entrepreneur of the Year 2013 at an awards ceremony in Monte Carlo on June 8. 

 

After the hardship of covering the World Entrepreneur of the Year competition in Monaco last week, I took a few days to recharge on the Italian Riviera. Occasionally, I thought back to some of the entrepreneurs I’d met and the stories I’d heard. And then, sitting on the breakwater of a sleepy little Italian port, watching the fishing boats bob up and down, I had an epiphany.

 

Canadian entrepreneurs have to get a lot smarter, stronger, and more global. Fast.

We’ve enjoyed privileged access to the U.S. market for years. But other parts of the world are now growing faster, and it’s no longer enough to be big in Buffalo or Boise. New, fast-growing entrepreneurial companies in Europe, Asia and South America are putting global markets into their business plans, and some of them are gunning for you.

In Monaco, I paid special attention to attendees from non-traditional business markets. I met with entrepreneurs from China, Estonia and the Czech Republic (in addition to Canada and Britain), because I was eager to learn how capitalism and entrepreneurship have sprung from Communist roots.

What I learned is that innovation is not confined to Canada and the United States, and that new ideas and breakthrough customer service can come to life anywhere in the world. This is important, because many Canadians assume the only thing developing markets have going for them is low costs. That’s no longer true, and there’s a growing cadre of ambitious entrepreneurs who can leverage value-added innovations and service on top of  their low-wage advantage — a one-two punch that will become increasingly lethal as these young firms gain confidence and global clout.

Here’s a quick recap of some of the entrepreneurs I met.

— Dr. Ma Weihua had a promising career as a mandarin at China’s central bank when he decided to take an entrepreneurial flyer. He took over management of China Merchants Bank, which had the advantage of being one step removed from state ownership. Starting with one branch in 1999, he built mainland China’s sixth largest commercial bank, with assets north of $500-billion.

How’d he do it? Unlike most of his state-owned rivals, he asked, what would customers like us to do? As a result, he pioneered in online banking, credit cards, wealth management, and even small-business  lending. He’s just now retiring, because he thinks the bank should be run by younger people who understand today’s mobile consumers.

— Frantisek Piskanin was working on a collective farm in the Czech Republic when its Communist government imploded in 1989. He now runs one of central Europe’s largest transportation and logistics companies, HOPI sro, with 3,300 employees. He carved his own path from the beginning; when he was hired by German retailer Tengelmann to facilitate the company’s imports into the Czech Republic, he confidently told the company that Czechs wanted to buy Czech goods, and began sourcing them on his client’s behalf.  HOPI’s value-add services include taking control of clients’ inventory, from point of production to store shelf, and revolutionizing the meat industry by building new freezer facilities across  Central Europe. He explains his customer-first strategy very succinctly; “We try to understand customers’ needs and bring them new solutions they had no idea could exist.”

— In Estonia, as you read in last week’s column, medical doctor Ruth Oltjer built a successful cleaning supplies and cosmetics firm, Chemi-Pharm. Chemi-Pharm began as a means to import less allergenic cleaning products from the U.K. following Communism’s fall, but is now a manufacturer that exports 50% of its production. Oltjer is eyeing markets in Asia and Western Europe, and is in talks with Mexico, which she hopes will lead to a frontal assault on North America.

— Even the 2013 World Entrepreneur of the Year fits the category of unlikely global entrepreneurs. Hamdi Ulukaya was born in Eastern Turkey and moved to the United States to learn English and study business. He ended up buying an unwanted Kraft cheese plant in upstate New York and revamping it to produce strained Greek yogurt. The Chobani brand has come from nowhere to be the No. 1 yogurt in the U.S.

But Ulukaya is just getting started. He has bought a factory in Australia and plans to enter the U.K. and Western Europe markets when a facility becomes available (finding the right plant is “an opportunistic thing,” he says). You may be interested to know Ulukaya first tried to build a plant in Canada. He found the perfect site and started drawing up plans, he says regulations prevented him from moving forward.

Ironic. While Canada holds on to protectionist rules, the rest of the world is charging forward.

These entrepreneurs may be the best of the best. But I’m betting there will be many more like them, bursting out of every corner of the world, driven by an urge to succeed and a vision of how different markets could be.

Are Canadian entrepreneurs ready for this kind of competition? Do they possess the vision to see things as they could be, not as they are? Do they have the courage to create what Piskanin calls “massive long-term savings” for their customers?  Are they as committed to innovation as Dr. Ma, who stepped down because he thinks in-depth customer understanding is the most important asset a company has?

Entrepreneurs across the globe are thinking bigger and seeing further. To join them, you have to ask:

What could your business be? How could it leverage its key strengths to create massive value? What adjacent markets (products  or geography) could you expand into? To quote Piskanin one more time, “If you don’t grow, you die.”

I’m not sure how many Canadian entrepreneurs really believe that. But they had better start, and soon.

Rick Spence

Data is Worthless if You Don't Communicate It

by Tom Davenport 

There is a pressing need for more businesspeople who can think quantitatively and make decisions based on data and analysis, and businesspeople who can do so will become increasingly valuable. According to a McKinsey Global Institute report on big data, we'll need over 1.5 million more data-savvy managers to take advantage of all the data we generate.

But to borrow a phrase from Professor Xiao-Li Meng — formerly the Chair of the Statistics Department at Harvard and now Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences — you don't need to become a winemaker to become a wine connoisseur. Managers do not need to become quant jocks. But to fill the alarming need highlighted in the McKinsey report, most do need to become better consumers of data, with a better appreciation of quantitative analysis and — just as important — an ability to communicate what the numbers mean.

Too many managers are, with the help of their analyst colleagues, simply compiling vast databases of information that never see the light of day, or that only get disseminated in auto-generated business intelligence reports. As a manager, it's not your job to crunch the numbers; but — as Jinho Kim and I discuss in more detail in Keeping Up with the Quants — it is your job to communicate them. Never make the mistake of assuming that the results will "speak for themselves."

Consider the cautionary tale of Gregor Mendel. Although he discovered the concept of genetic inheritance, his ideas were not adopted during his lifetime because he only published his findings in an obscure Moravian scientific journal, a few reprints of which he mailed to leading scientists.

It's said that Darwin, to whom Mendel sent a reprint of his findings, never even cut the pages to read the geneticist's work. Although he carried out his groundbreaking experiments between 1856 and 1863 — eight years of painstaking research — their significance was not recognized until the turn of the 20th century, long after his death. The lesson: if you're going to spend the better part of a decade on a research project, also put some time and effort into disseminating your results.

One person who has done this very well is Dr. John Gottman, the well-known marriage scientist at the University of Washington. Gottman, working with a statistical colleague, developed a "marriage equation" predicting how likely a marriage is to last over the long term. The equation is based on a couple's ratio of positive to negative interactions during a fifteen minute conversation on a "difficult" topic such as money or in-laws. Pairs who showed affection, humor, or happiness while talking about contentious topics were given a maximum number of points, while those who displayed belligerence or contempt received the minimum. Observing several hundred couples, Gottman and his team were able to score couples' interactions and identify the patterns that predict divorce or a happy marriage. 

This was great work in itself, but Gottman didn't stop there. He and his wife Julie founded a non-profit research institute and a for-profit organization to apply the results through books, DVDs, workshops, and therapist training. They've influenced exponentially more marriages through these outlets than they could possibly ever have done in their own clinic — or if they'd just issued a press release with their findings.

Similarly, at Intuit, George Roumeliotis heads a data science group that analyzes and creates product features based on the vast amount of online data that Intuit collects. For his projects, he recommends a simple framework for communicating about each analysis:

1. My understanding of the business problem
2. How I will measure the business impact
3. What data is available
4. The initial solution hypothesis
5. The solution
6. The business impact of the solution

Note what's not here: details on statistical methods used, regression coefficients, or logarithmic transformations. Most audiences neither understand nor appreciate those details; they care about results and implications. It may be useful to make such information available in an appendix to a report or presentation, but don't let it get in the way of telling a good story with your data — starting with what your audience really needs to know.

Tom Davenport

Thomas H. Davenport is visiting professor at Harvard Business School, the President’s Distinguished Professor of IT and Management at Babson College, and a research fellow at the MIT Center for Digital Business. He is coauthor of the new book Keeping Up with the Quants and the best-selling Competing on Analytics.