Business Insight Zone

When you fix the alignment on your car, everything runs smoother.

That little shimmy on the highway vanishes. Your mileage improves. Your brakes and tires work better and wear better.

Simple concept, really: you make sure that all the parts, all the systems are playing nicely together, and all pointed in the right direction.

But “alignment” gets a bad name in business because it has become a piece of jargon — like “buy-in” or “operationalize” or “net-net” (ugh).

It deserves that bad name, in many instances, because it’s not alignment in the sense that the mechanic at your garage uses. Instead, it means “falling in line behind the boss” or “not making a stink” or “raising objections only to have them summarily batted down.” It means straightening deck chairs as the ship takes on water. It’s the kind of alignment that afflicted GM and Chrysler for many years: you could take one of their cars to the shop and have it aligned lickety-split, but the companies couldn’t align themselves around the right goals in any meaningful sense.

Groupthink helps no one. It robs us of effectiveness because it takes a team’s diversity of views, experience, and expertise and grinds them into pablum.

Real consensus — forged through argument and analysis and discussion and passion and, sometimes, tears — drives some of the greatest businesses in the world.

Which one are you working toward?

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

In response to The three-part litmus test, for social media and everything else, Woody Williams left a comment today that hit home:

Curious: In the tripartite litmus test, where do people count? Internal people — owners, directors, managers, employees — are they “enterprise value?” People (internal) could help differentiate the organization, but is that it?

Organizations undertake many things to improve people and place related processes, infrastructure, and the like. The goal is usually happier, more optimistic, committed, and productive people. Is that worth a piece of litmus paper?

My response: absolutely — and the best companies fold in people considerations to everything they do.

Woody’s in good company: in this Inc. magazine interview, Jim Collins likewise stresses the importance of people in business.

Whether you’re running a business in 1812, 1886, 1925, 1950, 1975, 2000, 2050, I see nothing to contradict the principle that who comes first and what comes second, for a very simple reason: If you cannot predict the what, you have to be able to do a good job with the who, because the what is going to be constantly shifting.

Think about your own life, your own career. You’ve known people who were reliable under all circumstances, others who were unreliable, and many in-between. The same holds if we replaced reliability with creativity or empathy.

Who do you turn to if you’re starting a new venture? Or turning a company around? Or when you’re in bad trouble? Ideally, you’ll know people who are reliable, creative, and easy to work with — and who have the domain expertise you specifically need.

But failing that — unless the matter at hand is something like heart surgery — I’ll take the reliable, creative, and empathetic ones, not the subject-matter experts.

Get the who right, first.

I gave a little summary of the Dallas IMS last week while the event was still going.

My pal Richie Escovedo went considerably further in summarizing the sessions of the IMS that he was able to attend — to the point of embedding slide decks. Very good stuff:

Dallas Inbound Marketing Summit — From the Back Row

But now my friend John Johansen has taken the cake, writing up bullet-point summaries of nearly every session at the two-day event, and then handily indexing them into this single post:

Inbound Marketing Summit Wrap-up #IMS09

Posts like these do a real service to the community of marketers who can put this material to immediate use in their businesses, but aren’t able to attend the Summits.

Check out these posts to see what you can learn from some of the cutting-edge thinkers of the social-media world.

Social media is not just about marketing. As I said the other day, there are good reasons that its use has started within marketing departments at many companies, but it’s impossible that it will be contained there.

Jeremiah Owyang — someone you should read regularly if you care about this stuff — hits that nail on the head with this post, which I encourage you to read:

As Social Technologies Become Pervasive, Prepare Your Company

Here’s my comment on Jeremiah’s post:

I’ve been telling anyone who will listen that social media is not — cannot be — just a marketing or PR/corp comms item to be checked off a list. It is becoming more pervasive by the day, and while different companies, industries, and individuals will take up use of different types of social media at different rates, it’s naive to think that any of them *won’t* take it up.

As always in business, the focus should come back — as you rightly say — to customers. How do we serve them & give value to them? How do we build value across the enterprise? How do we differentiate ourselves in the marketplace?

These questions were relevant before the birth of the telegraph. They’ll still be relevant for as long as there are companies and customers — regardless of the specific technology in play.

What do you think?

More than a thousand posts into its run, this blog has built an eclectic audience of people coming at business problems from different angles. For as long as I write it, it will probably always reflect my own interests and worldview — but I also want to make sure that it’s doing you a service every day.

So, the floor is open:

How can this blog be of more use to you?

I hope you’ll knock me out with your comments.

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

One advantage of working at Hoover’s: I get thought-provoking e-mails like the one that follows from my co-workers. Chris Barton, besides being the person who ushered me in the door at Hoover’s nine years ago, is a keen student of industry trends (and a published author in his own right). Here’s what he sent me — all I’ve done is added links.

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http://17dots.com/

The skinny: eMusic, focused for its entire existence on the long tail of selling music from independent labels, just got the rights (starting on 7/1) to sell music from Sony (recordings at least two years old).

Bruce.

Bob.

Willie.

Miles.

Jacko.

Etc.

What’s this going to do to the company’s identity, and to the way they relate to their customers and the vendors whose product they’ve traditionally sold?

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I don’t have the answers to this, but given what I’ve seen at the 17 dots blog, I’ll bet that eMusic lands on something nifty that makes plenty of coin both for themselves and for Sony.

What do you think?

TORN from the comments on “Key lessons from the Inbound Marketing Summit”:

“If we can measure it, we are responsible for making it better.”

That’s from my friend John Johansen, citing the IMS presentation given by Mike Moran of Converseon. It offers a nice counterpoint to the blunt assessment of Stephanie A. Lloyd in her comment on “Social media and the acid-bath of ROI”:

“Trying to measure ROI of social media is stupid. It’s like measuring the ROI of sending emails or talking on the phone.”

Where do you come down on this issue?

They do it to drive me crazy.

I love FORTUNE magazine and have been reading it for ages, but this item makes me grind my teeth:

The 10 largest U.S. bankruptcies

To save you from paging through the whole thing, here’s their list, with asset values in billions of dollars:

1. Lehman Brothers — $691  — 2008
2. Washington Mutual — $327.9 — 2008
3. WorldCom — $103.9 — 2002
4. General Motors — $91 — today
5. Enron — $65.5 — 2001
6. Conseco — $61 — 2002
7. Chrysler — $39 — 2009
8. Thornburg Mortgage — $36.5 — 2009
9. PG&E — $36 — 2001
10. Texaco — $34.9 — 1987

(Note that the links for WorldCom and Texaco are to historical records, which are available to Hoover’s subscribers.)

There are two major problems here:

I. Nominal figures. Freshman economics students have it drilled into them that when you compare nominal figures across a range of years, you’re not comparing apples to apples. Yet this list ranks all of these bankruptcies by nominal dollars without a caveat (or, if FORTUNE is using real figures, the article doesn’t say so).

Here’s the same list with everything converted into billions of 1987 dollars:

1. Lehman Brothers — $413.2
2. Washington Mutual — $196.1
3. WorldCom — $73
4. GM — $54.4
5. Enron — $46.8
6. Conseco — $42.9
7. Texaco — $34.9
8. PG&E — $25.7
9. Chrysler — $23.3
10. Thornburg Mortgage — $21.8

(Note that the calculator I used only went through 2008, so I used that year for 2009 bankruptcies.)

Granted, this doesn’t change the order of the top six companies on the list, but (a) innumeracy about real and nominal values is common enough that it ought to be opposed at every turn; and (b) this listing at least compares apples to apples in terms of scale.

II. Financial assets. Banks, mortgage companies, and other financial services companies are in the business of holding assets. I ran a search on our Build a List tool for companies with more than $100 billion in assets, and what do you know? — it was dominated by banks, insurers, and the like for page after page.

In other words, it doesn’t work to suggest that the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy is seven times as big as the General Motors because Lehman held seven times as much in assets. We could compare revenue ($19 billion to $181 billion for fiscal 2007) or employees (28,600 to 266,000) or something else, but grading on assets alone gives us a false picture.

Or am I just missing something? Bankruptcy experts, economists, et al. feel free to weigh in — the floor is open for comments.

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