What does the MVP (minimally viable product) really mean and what do you look for in your company to know when you really have a market ready product? Click here to view The Art of Pivot in Agile Marketing video.
Too much content, too little time? No worries, I’ve gathered some of the latest and greatest resources from industry top performers. This week, everyone is talking about innovation and creativity and I found some gems from Forbes, Minnesota Public Radio, VentureBeat, SocialFresh, and more.
“The chief innovation officer is among the fastest growing new senior titles in the US corporate marketplace…The relative newness of the CINO means at least two things: it’s difficult to know what a great one looks like and behaves like, and there are few CINOs in the marketplace to recruit to your organization.” Luis Solis explains the alchemy and anatomy of a Chief Innovation Officer.
Sam Bacharach, director of the Cornell Institute for Workplace Studies, explains how leaders can encourage both outrageous ideas and practical follow-through. It’s up to the leader to build teams for creativity, balance that team for productivity, and know when to let them go wild and when to reign them in.
“A creative company culture is powerful. And there is nothing wrong with trying to be more creative. But creativity cannot and will never be built into a company in a single meeting, as we so often demand.” Founder and CEO of Social Fresh, Jason Keath diagnoses the issues of corporate brainstorming and offers a few tips to save it.
What makes 3M one of the most innovative companies in the world for the third year in a row? Minnesota Public Radio’s Kerri Miller sits down with Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter, chair at Harvard Business School and director of the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University to discuss what makes a company truly innovative. Many principles discussed also appeared in our article on Google’s 9 Principles for Innovation, such as giving employees 15-20% of their time to work on projects they are passionate about.
“You are what you eat.” But you also lead how you think.” Forbes contributor Glenn Llopis shares ten themes that leaders are consuming and what brings them back to it again and again.
Organizational leaders are often so focused on handling the many surface-level problems they must deal with, that they lose sight of the big picture. Yet, by taking a more expansive view one can gain true control of a market.
This is the essence of game theory: finding ways to give players (or firms) more control. The key is to develop a better understanding of your competitive environment and how that environment will respond to your actions. Once you have this understanding, manipulating your rivals to do what you want them to do becomes a possibility.
You can’t outcompete what you don’t know.
Putting game theory to work for your organizations starts with three key concepts: understanding other competitors; understanding how other competitors see your firm; and understanding “added value” and “outside options.” These concepts require you to put yourself in your competitors’ shoes. Remember, it’s not all about you. In this article, we’ll focus on understanding other competitors to kick things off.
Let’s start with building an understanding of your strategic environment and how to influence it. Here are four questions you need to ask in order to better predict how your rivals will react, and to gain more control:
What are my rivals really after? Just profits, or are other goals important? Maybe market or customer service leadership is their goal, or being the biggest, even is these goals don’t bring the highest profits. Even if rivals are only interested in profits, are they long-run or short-run thinkers?
Game theory isn’t a Jedi mind trick. It’s using your knowledge of rivals to predict how they’ll react, and hopefully, using this insight to get them to act in ways that are beneficial to your firm. Once you understand your rivals, you may be able to choose your own actions so as to get your rivals to behave in a manner that suits you.
I’m not saying this is easy, by the way.
How does it work? Here’s an example. Your rival is trying to decide whether to introduce a high or low quality product. You find out they’re leaning towards the high quality product, but this is also a move your firm would like to make. In this case, you have three options based on what you know:
If you choose Option #3, the assumption is that your rival is still trying to decide which product to offer. This allows you to “force their hand,” making it more likely that they will introduce a low quality product instead — decreasing direct competition for your new product, and potentially increasing revenues because you now corner the market for this high quality product, have a reputation for excellence with customers, and may be able to charge a premium price.
The key concept of game theory is understanding the overall competitive environment, and how individual players think and behave within it. This understanding makes it easier for your firm to make profitable decisions. But game theory doesn’t tell you which decision to make—it only tells you which factors to consider. It’s just one part of competitive analysis. Typical industry analysis and market positioning frameworks are still crucial tools for honing your competitive advantage.
Social media for CEOs is all the buzz for employee engagement and was a hot topic at Salesforce’s Dreamforce 2013 conference in San Francisco. Jive’s VP of Global Alliances, Rob Brewster sat down with eCornell to discuss KPIs and how a CEO can use social media to foster employee engagement and productivity as well as nurture organizational culture. Specifically, Rob speaks about the right way to do executive messaging, how to vastly improve the process of on boarding new reps, and how to do global collaboration the right way. Click here to view the 3 Ways to Win For the Social CEO video.
At the second “fireside” chat at Dreamforce 2013, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was actually left speechless and blushing by a few statements from Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg as she covered topics from aggression in the workplace to gender bias and even a tip for improving your sex life (hint for the men, do more laundry).
The top takeaways from the evening:
“When a boy leads, we don’t call him bossy because he is expected to lead. When a little girl does it, she is called bossy and told from an early age that she is not meant to lead.” – Sheryl Sandberg
From an early age, professional ambition is expected of men, but is often thought of as optional, or even negatively for women. “She is so ambitious” isn’t exactly seen as a compliment in most countries. The same “ambitious” behaviors from men are often labeled “aggressive” when coming from women.
Studies show that more diversity leads to more innovation and productivity. If as a CEO, you are willing to talk about and address gender bias directly and work better with 50% of the population, it’s a huge advantage for everyone in your company.
“I want to have more women leaders at Salesforce and have more balance between my men and women leaders. It’s selfish because I know it will create a better company and that reflects on me.” – Marc Benioff
If we had more women at the political tables around the world, who knows how different the decisions would be. Benioff asked Sandberg if she thought the world would be more peaceful if women were in charge. Her answer: “I say let’s try it. It couldn’t get any worse!”
Despite friendly encouragement from Benioff, Sandberg denies any desire to run for president. She says despite it being a landmark milestone, having a female president in the US won’t erase the major issues. “We need to see [women] represented in all parts of leadership, in corporations and government” before we start to see a real change.
“Real change will come when powerful women are less of an exception.” – Sheryl Sandberg
The Product Lifecycle (PLC) framework draws controversy proportional to its use — and it gets used everywhere. Anytime a new product category gets introduced into the market, PLC predicts it will follow a pattern. Gauged only by the time it takes to move through each of four steps in the pattern, it allows marketers to estimate a product’s lifespan based on how it follows a bell curve.
The time this takes varies among product categories. Market analysts have to track the sales to calculate when the product has reached a peak. Then they have a tough choice between spending more on marketing to stretch out the product maturity phase, or to just not bother with marketing at all. This brings this framework’s greatest controversy. Critics claim that counting on the PLC accelerates decline when marketing budgets get cut. Excessive caution, they claim, can even generate decline before product maturity has lived out.
One reason for that perception is unexpected market influences. Consider prominent toy products, like Hula Hoops. They tend to have a genuine cycle in their lifecycle, with decline eventually returning to growth as parents who enjoyed them as children want their own kids to enjoy them as well. In 2012, according to CNN Money, this happened when Easy Bake Oven, My Little Pony, Hot Wheels, G.I. Joe, and Big Wheel began making a comeback.
Media also affects such resurgent growth. The movie Toy Story created a marketing landslide for Buzz and Woody dolls, the films new characters, but also brought a surge of interest in the classic Mr. Potato Head and Slinky Dogs. These all show that clever consideration of all market forces — and creative application of strategic alliances and innovative exposure — can turn the PLC back around on itself. The key is for superior marketers to proactively generate “unexpected” influences, rather than waiting for some that may never come on their own.
Despite a late arrival and an interruption of protestors, Marissa Mayer and Marc Benioff’s “fireside” chat keynote at Dreamforce 2013 was what the crowd was looking for, an insight into the innovative changes Mayer has led at Yahoo. Among the major topics were Yahoo’s focus on simplicity across design, leadership, and prioritization.
“You don’t get to design the products, but you can design the organization.” – Mayer
If you are designing for the global market, you better hop on a plane and experience your target market first hand. If you haven’t seen how someone uses their phone or laptop in Japan, Italy, or India, then you don’t understand it. Getting the real pulse and vibe of digital in a country is impossible without a first hand experience.
Your products may be able to perform 1,001 different tasks, but what solves the main pain point for your customers should be front and center. Think about the Xerox machine. It may collate, staple, scan, fax, and even email things for you, but what do you want it to do? Copy things. And that is what the giant green button is for. Design your products around the giant green button.
While designing for simplicity and beauty should be a top priority (just take a look at the weather app), don’t get carried away with it. At the core, your products need to be useful and provide value to your customers in a simple way.
“The team is on offense, they’re going to move the ball. Your job is to say, ‘Hey, we’re going to run in this direction,’ and clear a path, get the obstacles, the process, the bureaucracy, the nay-sayers out of the way and help people run as fast as they can.” As a good CEO, it is your job to clear obstacles out of the way to empower your team to work on the issues that they see are most important.
Make your priorities clear from the very start and stick to them. If you make a to do list every day in prioritized order and you never get to the bottom of that list, you should feel successful. It seems counterintuitive, but if you finished the entire list each day, then you just spent a significant portion of your day on unimportant tasks.
With two more days of sessions and keynotes, including Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg, keep an eye out for more news and strategies from Dreamforce 2013 on innovation, growth, talent, and leadership from eCornell.
The challenge of getting your organization to adopt something – a new piece of software; a new business strategy; a new anything – can sometimes be daunting.
The journey towards adoption becomes all that more meaningful when you’re moving an organization in new directions.
Rob Jeppsen, SVP Commercial Sales for Zions Bank, presented at DF13 his approaches to earning organizational adoption of Salesforce.com.
Jeppsen used successfully a three step process wherein the leader of the organization or the adoption effort is crucial. If adoption isn’t happening, he said, it’s often due to weak leadership skills.
Adoption, he stressed, continues throughout – it’s a continual process, even when you think you might be done.
Jeppson’s three phases of adoption, as applied to getting his sales team to use Salesforce.com
Hugo Sarrazin, Senior Partner, and Lareina Yee, Partner, at McKinsey broke down the major trends for sales organizations today and beyond and the major story was that customer behaviors are shifting and you need to as well. They are more sophisticated, they know more what they want, and they want to have more authentic communication. Download free the executive summary of Sales Growth: Five Prove Strategies from the World’s Sales Leaders.
By 2020, there will be.more than 50 billion connected devices.
75% of Millennials use social media.
Your customers already expect you to do your homework before you talk to them: know their education, their interests, their skills, and the trends that they are looking at. How? 74% of B2B decision makers use LinkedIn to research their customers before the very first call.
Make your first meeting feel like the fifth.
The funnel paradigm has changed and is quickly disappearing. Embrace the new customer decision journey. More customers each day are researching your product prior to engaging with a sales rep. Use social media to find the sentiment and identify the trigger points that deliver a better user experience that moves to sales.
Customers use an average of 6 channels for prospecting and are frustrated when they are presented with inconsistent experiences across those channels. The companies that have the competitive edge ensure that their brand and value propositions are always in the right place at the right time.
To read more about McKinsey’s principles for growth, download free the executive summary of Sales Growth: Five Prove Strategies from the World’s Sales Leaders.
With well over 100,000 people in attendance at DreamForce, it’s easy to get lost in the hustle and/or bustle. Even more difficult is to keep your focus on why you came here in the first place – to learn new ways to drive business growth and efficiency.
The eCornell team has one goal during our time at DreamForce – to tune out all of the DF13 noise and focus in on the best information for business leaders and decision makers.
We’ll be posting throughout the conference from a selection of sessions we’ve identified as key for
Marc, Marissa and Deepak will have some great insight to impart, for sure. But the hundreds of sessions spread across San Francisco that comprise each day of DreamForce 2013 are where the real gems are found.
Armies of experts and innovators are presenting invaluable knowledge for the duration of the 4-day conference. The trick is sorting through the glut of sessions for the messages that really hit home for the decision-making crowd.
From keynotes to key themes, we will write and report with your business growth in mind.
As Cornell University’s external education unit, eCornell expands the reach of Cornell to professionals and organizations worldwide via executive education, online learning and lifelong learning programs.