Weekly Links (Week of Jan.11, 2010)

Tonight our class will get back together to receive our diplomas at a ceremony in Winston-Salem, but before I make the two hour journey west on I-40, I thought I'd post a few links that I found interesting and relevant to recent areas we analyzed in class.

Best Buy Wants Your Junk (Fortune: Dec.2009) - A look at how Best Buy not only leverages the "green" movement as a mechanism to drive reputation, but also offers a glimpse into the concept of companies moving from product-centric to service-centric. Towards the end of the article, Best Buy talks about their vision of being directly involved with the recycling of customers old products as part of the overall "eco-value chain".

Can Farming Save Detroit? (Fortune, Dec.2009) - Having grown up near Detroit, and constantly seeing the abandoned houses (left over from the 1968 riots), I always wondered if that space would ever become productivity or useful again. The signs of problems have been visible in Detroit (and Michigan) for many years, with all their eggs in the automotive basket, but it's still amazing to see how quickly things have declined. While this concept is controversial, I am hopeful that it gets traction and begins to be a catalyst for other positive things in the area. It's going to take radical ideas to change a culture that has been embedded for 75 years, but some many incredible things have come from the area that I still hold out hope.

And in honor of our graduation tonight, I'll end with this link from Seth Godin, highlighting the most important aspect that each of us should have taken from the last 18 months. It seems to touch on one of the critical elements that we'd hear if we had a cool graduation speaker.

Stay hungry, Stay foolish my friends...

Where Middle Age and The Internet Collide

I've written before that one of the interesting aspects of an Executive MBA program is the challenge that student face between pursuing that "next big idea.." and existing obligations to family, debt, etc. In more cases than not (unfortunately), people tends to stick with something comfortable, a known entity. Forget the fact that the world doesn't reward people for security, and that the world moves faster now than ever before, but it seems to be the nature of many people to take the safe path.

In watching the drama at NBC unfold over their late-night schedule (Jay Leno, Conad O'Brien, Jimmy Fallon), it's interesting to see a similar set of decisions being made. On one hand you have the incumbant, NBC, acting like a middle-aged adult that doesn't want to deal with the new rules of life. Being protective, being predictable. On the other hand, you have newcomer Jimmy Fallon understanding that "Time doesn't matter to me...We're in a different age now." (reference to Internet video, DVRs, etc), being willing to explore the new rules of the game and accepting that things don't need to match the old behavior to be successful.

In a parallel thread, I've just started reading "Linchpin" by Seth Godin. I've written about Seth's influence on me during my MBA many times, but this book is really hitting home for me. The theme of the book is that greatness is the only thing that matters in business anymore. Everything else will be repeatable, and hence replaceable. So each of us need to look at ourselves and find that area of greatness, of passion, or uniqueness and pursuit is with reckless abandon. If you don't, then any short-term security you think you have is probably flawed and could disappear when the next down economy forces your company to rethink your role.

At times I think we all get lulled into thinking that security is good, and that only the little guys need to really be great or innovative. This is a dangerous trap and one that needs to be avoided in order to survive. The Internet only accelerates the pace at which that false sense of security can turn into non-competitive or non-innovative weakness. And besides, life is too short to not be passionate about the things that comsume so much time in our life.

Some Excellent Entrepreneur Blogs

Here's a few of my favorites. Some business starters, and some business investors:

Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures) - A VC

Marc Cuban - Blog Maverick

Seth Godin - Blog

Mike Hirshland (Polaris Ventures) - VC Mike

Marc Andreessan - pmarca

Jeff Pulver - Blog

Tim Ferris - Four Hour Work Week

Phil McKinney - Killer Innovations

Andrew Warner - Mixergy

Mark Suster - (GPR Partners) Both Sides of the Table

A Lesson in Permission Marketing

As an avid fan of Seth Godin and his mantra of Permission Marketing, I learned a valuable lesson this weekend about the cost of attention in the digital economy.

I've mentioned before that I'm somewhat of an information junkie, constantly looking for ways to connect the dots between different concepts and different types of businesses. In my mind, there is a certain level of satisfaction in finding those disconnected snippets and sewing them together. Mistakenly, I also believed that the connected snippets might be of interest to my classmates as we try and apply our learnings to our working environments.

After a Q&A session in class this weekend, a classmate cut one of their questions short and instead tossed out a, "I'm sure Brian will send out something on that.." comment. He was partially joking, but 100% accurate that I had now violated any previous permission that he may have allowing me (regarding the sharing of information) in the past.

Where I made my mistake was ignoring four critical factors:

• While the sending of bits (ie. email) is essentially free, the cost of interruption for the receiving party is nowhere near free. And unlike Twitter, where people actively choose to receive your information, email does not easily permit the receiver to filter/ignore your noise.
• Managing information is a completely asynchronous process, with each person doing it in their own way. Not everyone deals with information overload in quite the same way, and very rarely do overload or excessive noise result in positive interactions.
• Permission is not a one-time event. It's a constantly re-evaluated model, where the the allowance of permission can be a binary decision based on the last interaction or the last level of value (real or perceived) provided to the user.
• Permission is not a supply-led function, it's completely demand-based. What's useful (or perceived useful) for me in no way implies that it is useful to anyone else. And this holds true on an interaction-by-interaction basis.

Lesson learned. While their cost of transmission may be the same, not all digital communications mediums are created equal. The same goes for communicating new ideas, or influencing others. It's not always a "lowest-cost provider wins" game.

Once again, it's good to make mistakes in the classroom rather than out in the real world.

The Future of Education, MBAs?

Recently, there's been a spike in new educational "institutions". Ranging from University of the People to Seth Godin's SAMBA to Jack Welch's Management Institute to Richard Branson's School of Entrepreneurship. Are these fads, since the publishing industry is going under and folks like Welch and Godin need new outlets for their work, or is this another nail in the coffin of the traditional MBA? With BusinessWeek for sale, and potentially no longer existing, will the BusinessWeek rankings for MBA programs continue to be relevant, or will this get picked up by a blog?

Just like every other large institute that was prominent during the 20th century, traditional universities are now having to adopt to greater global competition and distributed/democratized competition. How they adapt to this new environment is a chapter that will be written over the next 5-10 years.

Summary of (SA)MBA Learnings

This is an excellent summary of the learnings and experiences from Seth Godin's SAMBA program from @BeccaNY. While their program is more condensed than the WFU program, I believe that I've seen very similar changes and learnings from myself and my classmates. If nothing else, an MBA program can be a great excuse to get out of your day-to-day rut and explore what you can make happen based on the trial and tribulations of your classmates and coursework.

NOTE: I just noticed that all of the participants have provided updates on their views on the programs. Lots of interesting insight, and probably some suggestions for institutional MBA programs.

Entering New Markets - Gathering Ground Level Information

One of the areas that we've been focused on in our International Business course has been the challenges that many companies have when they attempt to move into foreign markets, often assuming that knowledge from their home country will translate into the new market.

As companies send people forward into a country to start doing market research, this is a simple way to get very raw reactions to your concept. The beauty of this is that it's incredibly simple, incredibly inexpensive, and doesn't hide the human element behind a bunch of summarized numbers (or biases). This could be collected and frequently sent back to the product or strategy teams to give them data points to make adjustments to their original plans.

"Free" - Business Model, Crossroads, or Jumped the Shark?

My StratMktg professor, Dr. Jim Narus, thought I was crazy to keep talking about strategies and concepts built on free or freemium. None of those fit into the existing models or textbooks, so they can't possibly be viable, correct?

I'm not sure what the world will look like in 5 years, but here are a few other opinions:

• Malcolm Gladwell - Priced to Sell
• Seth Godin - Malcolm is wrong
• The Financial Times - Free does not like up to its billing
• Mark Cuban - Free vs. Freely Distributed
• Mark Cuban - When you succeed with Free, you are going to die by Free
• Chris Anderson - Malcolm, why so threatened?
• Squidoo Lens on "Free" - Does Free make sense? (public discussion)
• Fred Wilson - Freemium and Freeconomics
• A recent digital business example - When SaaS hits Critical Mass, the Game Changes

Whatever the future holds, the concept begs us to ask ourselves if we are being competitive in the market and continuing to add value to customers. Just as I wrote about the impact that China will have on our world, the idea that digital assets, goods and services will change your world is inevitable.

It's now up to each person to decide how they will react to the new rules.

The "E" in EMBA does not stand for Entrepreneur

I really enjoy the WFU MBA program. The level of learning and discussion is excellent, and the quality of the people (classmates & faculty) is outstanding. But the conservativeness of the majority of the group is one aspect that frustrates me every time I drive back to Raleigh on Saturday evenings.

I understand the root of it - a bunch of successful people that have gotten to a decent level in their companies, have families and mortgages, and are happy with where they are today. So they bring their conservative mindset into the classroom, and it shows in many of the discussions we have about company strategies or business models. From talking to friends in other programs, I don't believe these characteristics are unique to the WFU MBA program.

The white elephant in the room is that almost all of my classmates have another 20-30 years of work left in their careers. And on top of that, most of their companies and industries will either not exist or be radically changed in the next 5 years.

I can't tell anybody else how to think or act. But it seems to me that the classroom would be the perfect place to experiment with thinking about innovation, business disruption, new business models, and new forms of risk. Maybe the downturn in the economy will push some people to consider looking at ways in which they can adapt to the changes that will confront us over the next 20-30 years.

Textbook Rant

Thank you, Seth. I couldn't agree more!! And this isn't strictly a Marketing course problem, it's an issue for 99% of the courses. I have a pile of books that I lug around each semester, and they will eventually take up space in my home office, and I can't remember one moment over the past 12 months when I was class I had a textbook instead of an electronic copy of something. Not once!!

[UPDATE - In all fairness, I need to note that Dr.Iacovou did conduct our ITMgm't course in an all electronic format. This approach seemed to be well received by at least 75-80% of the class, so consider that a step in the right direction.]

Killing the Trolls of your Past

Another good find from Seth Godin. I noticed this at the end of the first semester as classmates told us about their background in our LOB class. So much of their decision-making today was guided by one of those "trolls" from their past. As I mentioned in my China Hangover post yesterday, I've been overwhelmed this week by how much of this I hear around the office. "We can't do that because....", it's almost always based on some failed attempt sometime in the past. Nobody seems to remember that today isn't yesterday and the world is not the same.

One of the most powerful sessions we had in China was a meeting with WFU MBA alum GeFei Li, who has bridged his knowledge of both Chinese and American business and culture into an incredibly successful set of companies. He talked about how many business people approach China with preconceptions or as the enemy, most of whom fail. Approaching business in China requires a new open-mindedness and a willingness to look at this as a win-win partnership. Letting the trolls dictate your goals or agenda is a recipe for disaster. It's not easy to let the pains from old wounds impact your judgment, but it's critical to look forward and find a way to view the world from today's viewpoint, with a vision towards the future. The trolls are in the past, and the past can't be changed.

Interesting Business Models & Selling Techniques

While classroom studies are interesting, the real value comes in the translation to real world activities. I periodically go through my list of interesting business models or sales techniques to see how they leverage learnings from the classroom, or break the traditional rules to create new opportunities.

Here's a few that I recently found interesting:

Tats for Tees - Interesting approach to reducing the concerns that people have about spending too much on a "want" (not a need) in a challenging economy.

3/50 Project - Powerful concept; Shared concern for 1000s of people; Explained in a simple way that many people can understand and take action.

Threadless - Redefining how a basic product (T-Shirts) is designed, forecasted, and manufactured. Embracing community on a whole new level.

Etsy - Leveraging the long-tail of the market for hand-made goods. A simple way for companies to get access to a huge market, that previously would have been expensive and cluttered.

Getting your Business to the Right Size

I've written about this before, but Seth always seems to be more elegant at describing concepts that will effect our future. So what does this mean for companies and employees?

On one hand, it means that there won't be as many jobs available (from big companies) in the future as there have been for the past few years. On the hand, it means that companies will look for more ways to leverage outside "groups" to provide functions for them. This isn't a new concept, it's called outsourcing. But outsourcing in the past was about large companies taking over chunks of work for other large companies.

I think that's going to change going forward. It's going to be more project-by-project, or what's sometimes called "Hollywood-style", because it's similar to how studios bring together various groups to make the movie and then it disbands. And with all the interconnectedness via the Internet, those groups can be small and geographically dispersed.

So I believe what this will create is a new market for big companies and small independent groups that create expertise in making this Hollywood-style work very efficiently. Not only will they bring world-class skills, but also world-class integration and process-management. There are some opportunities here for people with operational and project management expertise to create quite a niche expertise and consulting business.

The Marketing Chicken or Egg

Just a little reminder to my classmates as they prep for the Value Proposition work in StratMktg this weekend.  Not only does this include one of my favorite video clips, but also a simple way to explain that marketing does not equal advertising.  

Transitioning Traditional Business to Online Business

Anytime we learn something new, we frequently search for an analogy or previous experience to relate with it.  It makes us feel comfortable.  Combine this with the fact that many things computer-related can be unknown or frightening to people 30+, that weren't born with Internet DNA.  Seth makes a great point of this on his blog today.  Taking advantage of the technology or moving aspects of your business to the Internet is not as simple as "add computer".  

The good news for non-IT managers is that the equation is more heavily skewed towards their experience than one may initially think.  Their knowledge of the business is critical as a foundation for understanding what is needed to make the move to the Internet (or any automation) work.  But of course that experience needs to be combined with an open-mind that aspects of the online business make be very different from the tradition business.

Strategic Marketing Project - Lessons from the Front Lines of Social Media

I'm pretty excited tonight because we got our mid-term Strategic Marketing project approved. (The abstract is listed below) Portia Mount and I had actually talked about a concept like this prior to the class starting, so we were glad that we'd be allowed the flexibility to choose the topic and scope.

Portia is VP of Marketing for her company, so I believe she's been thinking about aspects of this since last summer.  I got the original idea while reading this article from Umair Haque, as part of a continuing series he's doing on Edge Economy and the need for radical innovation to break us out of the challenges of the current economic crisis.  It also connected for me as I reflected back on stories from both Wikinomics and The Future of Work, as they looked at the value of sharing information externally, building communities, building partnerships, and truly building companies that can survive in the pace of the 21st century.  Listening to Seth Godin's podcast on Tribes and Leadership today completed the circle for me, showing how all of these pieces and ideas came together in the 2008 election.

The other element of the project that I'm excited about is that we're hoping to show how this 21st century approach can be applied to more traditional brick & mortar companies.  Portia and I felt like this would be an interesting challenge to research, as well as our way of giving something back to the rest of the class.

The paper and presentation aren't due until mid-April, but I'm already looking forward to starting on this project.  I'll be sure to post updates as we move along.

=======ABSTRACT========

ObamaNation: Lessons from the front lines of social media.

This presentation will look at how the Obama campaign used social media strategies to mobilize grassroots audiences to win the White House and what business might learn from this success. In this presentation we'll highlight noteworthy examples including:

1. The use of Social networking sites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter that created new online communities.
2. The Campaign website and its use of targeted messages to create urgency to generate record breaking campaign donations
3. How mainstream newsmedia outlets took advantage of the unprecented online presence during the campaign season to connect to new and younger voters
4. How the rise of the citizen journalist and an expanded blogosphere allowed Obama, a virtual unknown at the start of the campaign, to gain global recognition in one campaign season

Discussion of the Week - Exponential Times

We had several interesting discussions in class this weekend, but I'll go ahead and pick a discussion from our IT Mgm't course as the introductory "Discussion of the Week" topic.  I actually learned more in the early discussions in the OpsMgm't and StratMktg courses, but I think this discussion had broader relevance to our overall MBA program.

The discussion centered around a snazzy Exponential Times video, looking at the pace at which our world is changing due to this technology they call "the Internet".  Prior to watching the video, we were asked a simple question, "How do you see the trends of the last 10 years continuing (or failing)?"  The responses ranged from Globalization to Big Box Retail to Greater Customization, alot of stuff that you read about in the press on a daily basis.  All good answers, but then we watched the video.  

As a group of (on average) 30-40yr old folks, the immediate response in the room was fairly quiet.  When you're between the Boombers and GenY demographics in the US, and the mass of humanity in both India and China, it's an interesting place to be...to say the least. 

As a group, we face several challenges and opportunities:

• While we're technology literate, we're really the first generation to move through this as a learning curve, not as a part of our DNA (sorry Boomers....you're on the way out, so I'm not counting you anymore)
• We've grown up in a world where companies followed the strategies and models defined in the 20th century.  We learned and been trained in companies that sold locally and regionally, and that survived over many decades.  Our MBA program is somewhat of a bridge between those 20th century models and scratching the surface on 21st century ideas.  

Having lived on Internet time for the past 15 years, I felt comfortable (as much as anyone can be) with the explosiveness of the numbers in the video.  I've lived with growth on that scale for a long time.  What I need to get my head around is the idea that many of the current business models I know will be (or already are) obsolete.  The good news is I have Fred, Seth and Umair to balance my work experience and MBA learnings.

1st Semester Summary - LOB (Part II)

The final project for the LOB class was a self-analysis paper and presentation, in the context of the topics we studied throughout the class, along with an action plan to improve the areas we identified as weaknesses.   Everyone was given 15 minutes to convey not only their analysis, but also an aspect of their personality that the class may not be aware of, or what made them unique.   I talked about my presentation in earlier posts, so wanted to touch on a couple of other presentations that I thought were very interesting.  I'm hoping to explore some of these topics in more details in later blog posts (interviews, Q&As, video discussions), but I'm working out the details at this time.

Cradle-to-Cradle (C2C) - One of my classmates runs an architectural firm, and is in the program to expand his business skills to augment his outstanding creative and engineering skills. His presentation highlighted some work that he started in 2004, based on the inspiration that he received from the book Cradle-to-Cradle, which explores the biomimetic approach to the design of systems.  To say that this was "work" is really underselling his efforts.  It really was a mission, or a crusade, to not only explore this area for his own work, but to encourage a worldwide audience to help drive this thinking forward and bring it into reality. What excited me about this presentation were two things:

1. The opportunity to spend time exploring "Green" initiatives with someone that had been living and working in this space since before Al Gore invented Global Warming.  
2. The opportunity to spend time exploring how he created a tribe around his initiative, and how that effort spiraled into results that far surpassed his wildest expectations.

When Family Calls - One of my classmates is one of those people that you just know are impressive before ever meeting them.  They just carry themselves in such a way that you know they are intelligent, confident and successful.  They never get rattled, they ask interesting questions, and you're constantly asking yourself how they always seem to get things right?  This classmate of mine presented an interesting aspect of their life, and a decision they must deal with that I suspect many of us have to address at some point in our lives.  That question is, "When is the right time to prioritize personal growth or desires over family needs and commitments?"   In my situation, it's the realization that I have an obligation to take care of family in North Carolina, and that (at least in the short-to-mid term) means that I will need to sacrifice opportunities that would require me to move my family outside the state.  In my classmates case, it's the decision between a more glamourous lifestyle and one that impacts a family legacy.  It's a decision that I'm glad I don't have to make, because the consequences of any decision are more impacting than anything I have to deal with today.   

One of the downsides of a non full-time program is that you don't always get the opportunity to get to know all your classmates, as we meet less frequently and much time is spent in group study.  I don't know this classmate very well, so I'm not sure that I'll be able to expand much upon this aspect in later posts.  But I have a year, so maybe that's something I should make a goal for 2009.

Selling the Big Idea to Management - The final presentation that I wanted to highlight was a classmate/teammate that told us a story of trying to sell a future-looking, industry-changing idea to his upper management several years ago.  He talked about the research and prototyping he had done to create a working model for demonstrations.  He talked about the late nights and weekends he spent teaching himself computer programing and working with potential technology partners to integrate his system.  He spoke passionately about his plan for selling his idea up through his management chain, getting buy-in along the way.  And then he told us about the stumbling block that so many of us have encountered as we try and sell a new idea to management.  This part hit particularly close to home, as I've spent years trying to figure out the formula (timing, competition, technology trends, management bias, sunk costs, "not-invented here" syndrome, etc.) for bringing new products to market, or changing market dynamics through a new model.  

My classmate and I have put this at the top of our priority lists for 2009, to share our stories, experiences, scars & scabs, and see if we can come up with some better guidelines for selling that killer idea.  This will definitely be something I write more about in 2009.

By only highlighting three presentations, I'm significantly short-selling my classmates experience and background.  I apologize for that.  I would have loved to write more about my Indian classmates that speak 5-10 languages (the variants from the states in India), or my classmate that fights fires for a hobby, or the classmate that started the program as an IT administrator and now has at least 3 business models ready to engage.  

As the old newspaper adage goes, there are a million stories in the big city.  I'm not sure we have that many in our MBA program, but there is plenty of experience for me to learn from and explore in 2009.  Hopefully many of them will join the conversation here.

Bullish on 2009

I suppose I couldn't officially consider myself a blogger unless I jump on the bandwagon of making predictions and look forward to 2009. As I stated in an earlier post, I believe that the turmoil that so many companies, markets and countries are dealing with now will begin the spark of great things to take us into the next decade of growth. So the only attitude to take into a period like this is to be positive, show leadership and look for greatness. Some of my favorites echo those sentiments - Fred Wilson, Om Malik and Seth Godin.

As I told my MBA team a few weeks back, "2009 is going to be an interesting year. I'm filling my glass up to at least 3/4 full, regardless of what happens. Too many opportunities ahead."

Happy 2009 to all of you!!

One of the Great Ironies of B-School

As I mentioned in my post yesterday, one of the great challenges in life is accepting that you won't get your predictions about the future correct, so you need to be flexible in your planning. It's exactly the reason most of us go back and get our MBA. An MBA provides flexibility by exposing us to breadth and depth of business knowledge, often filling in existing gaps and further strengthening existing strengths. But the B-School model of groups
and teams, creates two interesting dilemmas:

1) If you only focus on your strengths during group projects, then you deny other people on your team the opportunity to expand their skills, and conversely you will suffer in areas of weakness on other projects.
2) Because of the variety of coursework within an MBA program, there typically isn't enough time to explore the depth of a single area that you may desire.

Faced with our current work culture, and the sad lie of mediocrity, how can anyone justify an MBA program if their goal is to reach higher levels in their organization?

I think the answer lies in an expanded way of thinking about goals and outputs from an MBA program. If you look at it strictly for grades, you'll most likely not retain the knowledge long past graduation. If you focus narrowly on a specific subject, then you have to question why you didn't just take some specialized coursework. But if you realize that the value in the program comes from much more than the coursework, and you deeply explore relationships, experience and critical thinking with classmates and professors, then I believe you'll come to the conclusion that great leaders overcome any areas of mediocrity by not only surrounding themselves with great individuals (who you need to identify, recruit & retain), but by being great in all the areas that exist between the subjects and relationships. An MBA program gives you the breadth and time to explore how to be great in those areas, and to me, that may just be the most important element of any MBA program.