The Energy Test: How Do You Feel Today?
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Microsoft Turns on a Dime to Beat Back Google Apps
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Layoffs at Ad Agencies Likely Much Worse Than Reported
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Entrepreneurship = Obsession?
Here at SmallBiz, we spend a lot of time thinking about what drives an entrepreneur. The issue was at the heart of our special report earlier this year on social entrepreneurship, and our feature story on how entrepreneurs beat burnout and stay passionate about their business. We've asked several of our guest columnists to examine the subject, including Steven Berglas and Vivek Wadhwa.
In fact, you could say we're obsessed.
I don't think that's a bad thing. After spending an evening listening to Robin Chase, co-founder of Zipcar and current CEO of GoLoco, dissect one of Carl Jung's paintings at the Rubin Museum of Art last week, I'm convinced that obsession is the core of the entrepreneurial spirit. The Rubin has invited numerous artists, intellectuals, and executives to sit on stage with a Jungian analyst and respond to a painting from Jung's legendary Red Book diary, which famously chronicles the psychologist's descent into madness. Chase could have gone anywhere with the painting, which featured a deity-like man floating above an urban waterfront scene. Instead, she spent an hour discussing the potential tragedy of climate change if people don't deal with excess capacity (share your cars!) and sprawl (infrastructure first!).
This sort of single-mindedness, even when presented with madness, is what has helped propel Chase to success. I'd venture that other entrepreneurs who dive into their business ventures wholeheartedly have the same. After all, what is it to sacrifice everything for an idea, if not madness?
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What Influence Do Marketers Have? | BTalk Australia
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Why Great Innovators Spend Less Than Good Ones
A story last week about the Obama administration committing more than $3 billion to smart grid initiatives caught my eye. It wasn't really an unusual story. It seems like every day features a slew of stories where leaders commit billions to new geographies, technologies, or acquisitions to demonstrate how serious they are about innovation and growth.
Here's the thing — these kinds of commitments paradoxically can make it harder for organizations to achieve their aim. In other words, the very act of making a serious financial commitment to solve a problem can make it harder to solve the problem.
Why can large commitments hamstring innovation?
First, they lead people to chase the known rather than the unknown. After all, if you are going to spend a large chunk of change, you better be sure it is going to be going after a large market. Otherwise it is next to impossible to justify the investment. But most growth comes from creating what doesn't exist, not getting a piece of what already does. It's no better to rely on projections for tomorrow's growth markets, because they are notoriously flawed.
Big commitments also lead people to frame problems in technological terms. Innovators spend resources on path-breaking technologies that hold the tantalizing promise of transformation. But as my colleagues Mark Johnson and Josh Suskewicz have shown, the true path to transformation almost always comes from developing a distinct business model.
Finally, large investments lead innovators to shut off "emergent signals." When you spend a lot, you lock in fixed assets that make it hard to dramatically shift strategy. What, for example, could Motorola do after it invested billions to launch dozens of satellites to support its Iridium service only to learn there just wasn't a market for it? Painfully little. Early commitments predetermined the venture's path, and when it turned out the first strategy was wrong — as it almost always is — the big commitment acted as an anchor that inhibited iteration.
These ingredients are a recipe for sustaining thinking — trying to leap-frog over existing incumbents with cutting-edge technologies. Research shows that market leaders tend to beat back these kinds of attacks, resulting in a lot of squandered resources.
So what should leaders do?
Be frugal with financial resources but generous with human resources. What holds disruptive innovation back in most organizations isn't a lack of money. It is a lack of committed people, a surplus of inappropriate mindsets, and a whole series of standard operating procedures that run counter to the fast-cycle decision making, in-market learning, and iterative approach to strategy required for disruption.
Freeing people to fully engage in this problem, and having leadership focus their energy on helping to ward off what I call the "sucking sound of the core" can be critical to success.
In an interview with Innosight, Intuit Chairman Scott Cook said that in his experience, the most successful disruptive teams have "an executive that is rooting for them, cheering them, mentoring them, actively spending time with them every week and protecting them from the antibodies of the rest of the companies that are trying to love them to death, or, exterminate them."
Signing checks is easier than spending time. If you are truly committed to innovation, though, spend less money and more time. You'll end up making substantially more progress.
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The News Hour on the Publising Industry
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A Forever Smile…The Key to a Carrot Culture Life
This last week I attended was honored to be the opening speaker at The Leaders in Dubai conference in the UAE. It was a first for me to be in that part of the world and I thoroughly enjoyed the city, the architecture and most of all, the people. The highlight for me was the chance to meet the venerable Arch Bishop Tutu who also spoke at the conference and was the closing speaker on the first day.
What impresses everyone about Bishop Tutu is his smile. It is a “Forever Smile” that immediately grabs your spirit and makes you smile! It is amazing how infectious he is and how the whole room lights up when he walks in. It is a tangible thing, it was extraordinary. I got me to thinking about how important smiles are to building a Carrot Culture.
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The Question Every Entrepreneur Faces: Is Lemonade Enough?
My first business was a lemonade stand that a friend and I set up at the foot of our local marina. We started with the traditional fare, but after a few days we noticed that our target market of tourists wanted more than saccharine lemonade and chocolate chip cookies: They wanted a gift shop.
So we invested in film and batteries and began hand-crafting souvenirs that we advertised as "made by local children." Business poured in from the tour buses that stopped in our small town, and suddenly we were making $75 a day — a princely sum for two 12-year-olds.
Our diversification plan worked so well that the owner of the Oak Bay Marina, a very kind man, bought us out within the week, laughing as he told us that we were damaging the traffic to his gift shop, and he would rather have us working with him instead of against him.
Thirteen years later I faced a similar opportunity when my husband and I took over Focus Creative Concepts, the family premiums-manufacturing business. Was just serving lemonade enough to grow our business in the long term, or should we offer a wider range of goods and target new kinds of customers?
I believed the business had major opportunities to diversify and grow. For instance, we had the capability to manufacture any non-consumable good (from mammogram machines to teddy bears) in a cost-effective way, which meant we could expand beyond our target market of consumer products companies that wanted to use premiums in their merchandising. Our potential customers included any business that outsourced material goods manufacturing .
But "businesses that need manufactured goods" was way too broad a target. So last year I narrowed it down to retailers that had private-label personal care products — a market that fit with our capabilities perfectly, was large enough to offer growth opportunities for years, and could provide us steady revenues to offset the ebb and flow of our premiums business.
Only a month after my husband and I took the reins, I divided the sales teams into two groups: premiums manufacturing for consumer products makers, and our new venture. At the time I thought that hedging our bets in two areas would mean a better chance of immediate revenue, but I now see that decision was a mistake for several reasons:
The timing. When an organization has new leadership and the core business is unstable, it creates a scary environment for employees, who are looking for reassurance that their jobs are safe and their day-to-day quality of life will return to normal. Introducing changes to the core business while adding a new capability was a training challenge and caused widespread confusion. The result was a wary staff and sub-par execution. I should have waited until I had delivered some wins and earned employees' trust before asking them to take a leap of faith and enter a new industry.
Not enough resources. Even if our staff was comfortable with making so many changes at once, with fewer than 50 employees we just didn't have enough people to develop two major offerings at once. As a result, neither arm of the business flourished. In hindsight, I should have stabilized one stream of revenue before opening up a second.
Barriers to entry. These are high in outsourced private-label manufacturing. The business is dominated by a few importers that have been in the industry from the beginning and provide cost efficiencies through minimal product differentiation among retailers. Next time you're in a CVS, take a look at the personal grooming section. You might find the exact same tools and accessories at Walgreens, Wal-Mart, and Rite Aid, with the only differences being price and the cards backing the products. In addition, the buyers were evaluating suppliers on a price-only basis. We had no power to negotiate — it was their way or nothing.
Now that I've survived my trial by fire, I'm ready to start again, but this time I can't slip up. A second false start would be devastating to my credibility with our staff and our investors, severely limiting my ability to maneuver in the future. If I'm going to add film and souvenirs to our roster, I'd better be sure that our new offering appeals to my chosen segment — or risk losing in a game where the stakes are my future as a leader of this organization.
So now I'm faced with the question of how. With a larger staff and a stable core business, our situation has changed. Should I reload and go back to fight the barriers to entry or try something completely different?
Right now, I'm thinking about the former. Call me arrogant, but I hate to fail. And now that I know what to expect, I can turn a barrier into a springboard and craft a positioning for Focus that highlights the lack of industry differentiation as a weakness. Why not figure out a way to deliver better differentiation while keeping the economies of scale? If we can offer clients both, we bust the barriers and play by the retailers' rules, all in one shot.
But one of the definitions of insanity is repeating an action and expecting a different outcome. So today I pose a question to you, my highly intelligent readers: Am I crazy to try again?
Would you look for less lucrative alternative areas for expansion, or keep at what you believe is your best option until you break through?
Tell me your stories and pass along your advice. I bet that together, we can come up with an excellent strategy — and I'll be sure to keep you posted on what we do.
Monica Tate-Maile is a managing partner at Focus Creative Concepts, a manufacturing and strategic consulting firm for consumer premiums. In her previous life, she worked for P&G Canada as a brand manager on some of North America's largest brands.
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Lead From the Top of the Mood Elevator
I walked into the office of a CEO of a prominent energy company for a first-time meeting and could see that he was visibly upset. Finally, I said, "You are looking a little down. Is there something troubling you?" For the next several minutes, I listened to him describe a litany of woes. The company was embattled. Negative press, plummeting stock and mounting consumer dissatisfaction were just sucking the juice out of the place.
The CEO had all but emotionally thrown in the towel. I handed him this little pocket card I always carry that has a graphic that we at Senn Delaney call "The Mood Elevator." He studied it for a few moments. The higher mood levels included adjectives like resourceful, inspired, energetic and curious. The lower levels include emotions like worried, irritated, victimized and low. The latter are not good states of mind to be in as a leader of a beleaguered company. If the top leader is not thinking and performing at his or her best, how can the rest of the company be expected to?
When this CEO looked at the higher mood states on the Mood Elevator that correlate with being at our best, he said, quite simply: "I need to be there. My company needs to be there. How can we get there?"
Most of us ride the mood elevator hour to hour and day to day. We stay up most of the time but are not even aware when we temporarily drop down to irritated and bothered, excessively judgmental or into an unhealthy impatience. Whenever we do, our thinking is less reliable and we do and say things we wouldn't in a higher mood state. We actually lose points of both IQ and EQ (emotional intelligence) when we do.
Why does mood matter in our personal and business lives? Your thinking determines your moods, creates your own reality and drives your behaviors. The results you achieve are the outcome of your behaviors. A wide range of studies support this. One especially helpful paper is "Why Does Affect Matter in Organizations?" published in the Academy of Management Perspectives earlier this year.
Authors Sigal Barsade, a Wharton management professor who studies the influence of affect or emotions on the workplace, and Donald Gibson of Fairfield University's Dolan School of Business, examined how employees' moods and overall dispositions have an impact on job performance, decision-making, creativity, teamwork and leadership. Leaders' displays of emotions, they noted, influence followers through emotional contagion: "Positive, upbeat emotions of the leader are emulated by followers, resulting in positive outcomes."
And yes, the beleaguered CEO I met with did move up the Mood Elevator. He and his senior team and then much of the organization got similar insights along our journey to change the culture. They focused their energy on being more accountable, collaborative and customer focused, and it did make a difference.
Here are five pointers I have seen work — as have many of my clients:
1. Become aware of your state of mind and use your feelings as your guide to the quality of your thinking. Make a conscious effort to notice where you are on the Mood Elevator. Use your feelings as indicators of the quality of your thought. Don't let unhealthy thoughts become so normal you don't notice them.
2. Take better care of yourself. Our physical state plays a role in our thinking. When we get tired and worn down we are more vulnerable to lower-quality thinking and lower moods.
3. Know your thoughts are unreliable when your mood drops. Our thoughts are often unreliable when we are in a lower state of mind. If possible, delay making major decisions until you move a few floors up the elevator. If you can't wait, try to respond as you would if you were driving on an icy road: use caution and do not overreact.
4. Maintain your perspective through gratitude and a sense of humor. Taking the time to think each day of some things you can be grateful for is a powerful mood tonic. When you have perspective, you can see your momentary problem, challenge or issue in the context of all that you have going for you in life. Humor and lightness help you handle your serious challenges in a better, wiser state of mind.
5. Be aware of your leadership shadow. One reason to be aware of where you are on the Mood Elevator is that moods are contagious. The central finding of my doctoral dissertation on organizational culture published over 30 years ago was that an organization's culture and climate is most greatly influenced by the shadow of their leaders. The biggest shadow we bring to work each day is our state of mind or mood. It is also the biggest one we carry home at night. That should be food for thought for all of us.
Larry Senn is the founder of Senn Delaney, a leading authority and practitioner in the field of culture shaping. Larry has led culture-shaping engagements for the leaders of dozens of organizations including Fortune 500 companies, state governors, members of a U.S. President's Cabinet, Presidents of major Universities and deans of Business Schools. Larry has authored or co-authored several books, thought papers, articles and publications. His latest book is the forthcoming Up the Mood Elevator - Living Life at Your Best.
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