Business Insight Zone

Maybe you don’t need me to tell you this. Maybe you’re already a stone-cold pro, and you’ve already ramped up your game to deal with the hard times. But if not . . .

You need rituals to succeed.

They don’t have to be elaborate. You don’t have to paint your face or scream at your teammates like linebackers do before a game. The rituals may not even be visible to anyone else.

You need to focus your mindset.

In this economy, success depends on giving your customers something they can’t stand to do without. It means showing your potential customers how their lives will be so much easier once they sign on with you. It means creating new products / services / widgets / whatever that meets some unfulfilled need for your market. Anything apart from that is a waste of time, so you need rituals or reminders or anything that will bring your focus back to customers-customers-customers.

You need to strip away pretenses.

Stop playing patty-cake with the could-do’s and wouldn’t-it-be-swell’s and the nice-to-have’s. Get right down to the point of contact.

Woo the customers you already have.

Find more customers like them.

Satisfy the hell out of them.

Go.

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Photo by Kristi, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

Hindsight is 20/20, but I’m feeling some schadenfreude about this item in the news:

Sirius XM: What Price Bankruptcy?

Before the XM/Sirius merger was finally approved, I joined the chorus of those who argued that the combination of the companies shouldn’t be regarded as the establishment of a monopoly. The point wasn’t the medium of delivery — radio specifically via satellite — but the host of competitors that the combined company would continue to face, from terrestrial radio to the iPod to the whole world of Internet audio.

I’m also hardly the first to point out the bigger issue: that it doesn’t work for us to think of our media the way we’ve always thought about them. Literally, it doesn’t work, because we as media consumers are disintegrating the old ways of doing media every day.

In other words, the “magazine business” isn’t just about physical magazines anymore. In some cases, it’s not even primarily about physical magazines. Same with “radio,” “movies,” “books,” “television,” et cetera. The underlying content is still there, because people still like to listen to music, look at pictures, read stories, and so on. But the parts of these businesses that were about the delivery of the content — those parts have been changed forever, and they’re still changing.

Oh, but one more lesson from the Sirius situation spans the ages and all media: cash is more important than your mother.

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Related:

• Western Union and record labels.
• The social media have historical precedents.
• The Social Media Are Not So New.

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Check this out, folks: One of our business partners, the newly launched free CRM provider SalesImpaq, is combining its own product debut with a charity fundraiser for the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

SalesImpaq’s founder and CEO, Brian Bigley, will be traveling nearly 500 miles — from San Francisco to San Diego — by foot, bicycle, and Segway to raise money for the LAF’s fight against cancer. His journey starts today, with a leg from the Golden Gate Bridge to the lovely town of Half Moon Bay south of San Francisco. Bigley has pledged 3% of SalesImpaq’s product sales for the next 12 months to the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

You can keep up with Brian’s progress through SalesImpaq’s Web site, or by following his updates on Twitter. His whole itinerary is included in the press release announcing his fundraising journey, plus we’ll be checking in on his journey from time to time here.

What’s our interest in SalesImpaq? The product integrates access to millions of Hoover’s company and executive records, and aims to enable small business owners and independent professionals to benefit from the same CRM capabilities and sales processes that bigger companies enjoy.

Good luck, Brian!

When I spoke at the meeting of the Houston Interactive Marketing Association last month, I also got to sit down with Russ Capper of TheBusinessMakers.com — a crossover broadcast-and-online radio show headquartered in Houston and dedicated to entrepreneurship. In two segments, Russ and I talked about the business merits of Twitter and other forms of social media.

The interview aired on a Houston radio station on Saturday, and now you can listen to both segments online:

• Segment One
• Segment Two

Feel free to use the comment threads there or here to share your thoughts. Oh, and if you use Twitter, you can follow Russ, too.

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Image by Alessandro Bonvini, used under a Creative Commons license.

That’s the moral of the story in “How to Build Your Network,” a fascinating 2005 Harvard Business Review article by Brian Uzzi and Shannon Dunlap. (You have to pay for access to such things if you go to the HBR site, but you might just accidentally find a PDF of the article if you went to Prof. Uzzi’s site at the Kellogg School of Management. Ahem.)

The article covers more ground than I want to relate here, so much so that my hard copy of it is marked up pretty thoroughly in two colors of ink. It even includes interesting exercises that will help you evaluate the current strength of your own network. For now, I want to focus on two things.

Bridging gaps & brokering between clusters

First, good networks — and good networkers — bridge social or informational gaps. We touched on this principle several weeks ago in a post about Ronald Burt’s great article, “Structural Holes and Good Ideas,” but the simple version is that it’s common for people to cluster in certain ways, whether that means you know the people on your street better than the people on the next street over, or that the programmers tend to eat together at one table in the lunchroom while the marketers eat at another.

The individuals with the most useful networks are the ones who know people on both streets, or who can move easily between the programmers’ and marketers’ tables. And in business terms, “useful” can definitely mean “most lucrative.” As Uzzi and Dunlap explain, good networkers who do this type of bridging or brokering reap the benefits of networks’ “three unique advantages: private information, access to diverse skill sets, and power.” All of these can translate directly to better success in business.

Here’s a key passage from the article:

While expertise has become more specialized during the past 15 years, organizational, product, and marketing issues have become more interdisciplinary, which means that individual success is tied to the ability to transcend natural skill limitations through others. Highly diverse network ties, therefore, can help you develop more complete, creative, and unbiased views of issues. . . .

. . . Traditionally, executive power was embedded in a firm’s hierarchy. When corporate organizations became flatter . . . that power was repositioned in the network’s information brokers, who could adapt to changes in the organization, develop clients, and synthesize opposing points of view. These brokers weren’t necessarily at the top of the hierarchy or experts in their fields, but they linked specialists in the firm with trustworthy and informative ties.

Sharing activities

Second, to build ties like these, Uzzi and Dunlap recommend that you share activities with members of different clusters. If you’re not a coder, you may not be able to talk shop with the programmers — but you could go running with them after work. You might not work in the marketing department, but maybe you could share a Meals on Wheels delivery route with one of the marketing directors.

The point is that you can find something that you share with all sorts of different people, including those who work outside of your department, outside of your company, and outside of your industry.

The process isn’t a mechanistic one, and it shouldn’t be a mercenary one either. When you do it right, you really will come to share interests and activities — that is, to make friends — with people from diverse social or business backgrounds.

Which, in my experience, not only gives you more ideas and makes you a more valuable worker, but also lets you have more fun.

Time to bridge some networks!

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Image by Oran Viriyincy, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

At some point, I’m going to get around to writing up my thoughts on The Black Swan and Fooled By Randomness. For now, here’s a choice quote from an absorbing August 2008 Portfolio interview with their author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

Lloyd Grove of Portfolio: Are the people who are running our financial institutions capable of learning from their mistakes and fixing them?

Taleb: No, and this is the problem with incentives. A C.E.O.’s incentive is not to learn, because he’s not paid on real value. He’s paid on cosmetic value. So he’s paid to be nice to the Merrill Lynch analysts or the Wall Street analysts. So this is where the problem starts.

Read on.

BONUS: Bryan Appleyard’s excellent June 2008 feature on Taleb from The Sunday Times:

• Nassim Nicholas Taleb: the prophet of boom and doom

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Adapting an idea from my Hoover’s colleague Chris Barton, I’ve gone back into the archive and added posts at the end of each month since July 2008 that list the top 5 most popular posts for that month. I stopped at last July because that’s when I started using Google Analytics; at some point, I may see if I can use other stats to generate similar lists for earlier months.

The idea is that, whenever somebody clicks on one of those months in the archive, the first thing they’ll see is a post — like this one or this one — that tells them which five posts were most popular for that month.

But hey, why wait for “whenever”? It’s Friday — treat yourself! I invite you to use the month links in the sidebar, pick something from the top-posts list, and read to your heart’s content. Leave a comment! Tell your friends! Spread the love!

(It’s possible — possible, I say — that I’ve had a wee bit much caffeine this morning . . . )

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Photo by Junichiro Aoyama, used under a Creative Commons license.

Not much talk here about the IPO market lately . . . because there hasn’t BEEN much of an IPO market lately. So when I saw on IPO Central that not one but two scrappy little outfits — Medidata Solutions and OpenTable — have filed to make public offerings, I chuckled, but I also had to admire the chutzpah.

Mind you, there’s many a slip betwixt filing and offer, so who knows if these companies will ever actually go public, much less when.

Further IPO posts to come as events warrant . . .

Call them bottlenecks, if you like.

I called them “chokepoints” the other day, but we also call them “bottlenecks” or “hangups” or “roadblock” or “pains in the a**.”

Years ago Intel walked away from its alliance with Rambus after Intel CEO said that Rambus’s technology acted as a “gate” on Intel’s design progress.

What “gates” are you living with?

Call them inefficiencies.

Here’s George David, chairman of United Technologies:

You can’t walk through life with a trained eye and not see the opportunities for productivity. Every time you sit in traffic, that’s a productivity loss. Every time you go to the doctor and fill out a bunch of forms and he refers you to somebody else and you fill out the same forms all over again, that’s a loss of productivity. Whenever you wait for something, that’s waste. I believe you can have 10 times more. I really do.

Call them “red tape.”

From the comments on the previous post on chokepoints, here’s my pal Rusty:

I believe that there is a lot of red tape and bureaucracy that a lot of us face when trying to make things happen at our jobs.

Granted, scheduling things like a conference room is something that shouldn’t take long to do, but there are times when simply getting things accomplished is harder than it should be just to “follow protocol” or “process”. So I can see chokepoints being all over the place that would take an army to change.

And I am also finding out here at my company that because systems have been in place so long, people want to avoid change, even if it means a change for the better. So it’s a vicious cycle at times too.

And here’s part of my reply:

Ideally, organizations diversify and specialize separate functions — that is, they create bureaucracies — for better efficiency. And it works: it doesn’t make sense to have your top salesperson and your top accounts-receivable clerk sharing each other’s duties.

But it’s also human nature to protect turf, and it’s in the nature of organizations, best I can tell, to develop points of friction — or chokepoints.

What points of needless friction are YOU living with?

Call them opportunities for improvement.

Consider this from Charles Fishman’s stellar December 2006 article on Toyota:

By the end of this year, Buckner and his team hope to have cut almost in half the amount of floor space the paint shop needs — all while continuing to paint 2,000 cars a day. For Buckner, the paint-shop improvements aren’t ‘projects’ or ‘initiatives.’ They are the work, his work, every day, every week. That’s one of the subtle but distinctive characteristics of a Toyota factory. The supervisors and managers aren’t ‘bosses’ in any traditional American sense. Their job is to find ways to do the work better: more efficiently, more effectively.

Just don’t call them intractable.

Now, more than ever, we have to find these chokepoints, acknowledge them, and address them.

Are you game?

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Previously: Watch out for chokepoints!

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Photo by Evan Wood, used under a Creative Commons license.

Consider three scenarios:

1. A colleague with a naturally loud, penetrating voice has an extended hallway conversation with someone that touches upon matters that might be better discussed in a conference room with the door closed.
2. Two friends sharing lunch at a restaurant get down into the details of their business at a high enough volume that everyone at neighboring tables can hear them.
3. Mr. Clueless blares away on his cell-phone headset on the train, in the airport terminal, waiting in line at the theater, or what have you. He does not filter his conversation to make it crowd-appropriate.

Now, given your own inclinations and the nature of what’s being discussed, your reaction might be “Shhh!” or it might be to perk up your ears. Just be sure YOU’re not the one broadcasting sensitive work information out to the world at large.

You never know who might be listening (competitors? suppliers? spouses? your boss’s boss’s boss?). You might give yourself or your company a bad name regardless of who’s listening.

Now you might be thinking, “Oh, I bet that’s happened to him recently.”

And you’d be right.

Feel free to share your own horror stories of overheard business conversations — anonymized, if need be — in the comments.

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Footnote: If you’re like me, the phrase “voices carry” evokes the 1985 ‘Til Tuesday song of the same name . . . so here’s the YouTube link for that song. I watched that video when it debuted on Night Tracks. I am now awash in nostalgia for the 1980s and my carefree youth.

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Photo by Mike Schmid, used under a CC-Share Alike license.