On The Wire: Melodrama and Expecting Better

I originally came across this link from the Los Angeles Review of Books through the MediaREDEF daily email newsletter. Since reading the review and the thematic ideas presented in On The Wire by Linda Williams, I've been consumed with thoughts about how this notion of melodrama fits with a broader view of things. Quoting from the review,

Melodrama, on the other hand, is, again, a liberal, democratic mode, in which suffering is presented as unnecessary if only the authorities, and indeed the viewers, would commit to change.

We started watching The Wire several weeks ago, not long after Amazon Prime began offering HBO series on their unlimited viewing options. As you're probably aware, it's one of those shows that critics always rave about. The critical reviews are so passionate, it sometimes leaves you feeling like you should probably avoid the show just on principle -- at least, that's sort of where we were with it. More like, not something we were going to seek out. But when it fell in our lap and we opened up to watching it, we've become absorbed.

But that original sense of skepticism runs deep, and it often leave me with a desire to avoid critics ranting about The Wire. So the link to this review wasn't one of the first things that I clicked from that email.

“melodrama always offers the contrast between how things are and how they could be, or should be.”
This isn't simply a theme in The Wire, it's a design theme, a Silicon Valley theme.

The Wire does not aristocratically call for an acceptance of the war on drugs or racism as inevitabilities to which its characters must resign themselves. Rather, it demands moral commitment and social transformation even as it demonstrates the power and intractability of institutional barriers to change.

This is the grand struggle, envisioning a better world, then striving to make that world a reality. This is also the dream of work life in Silicon Valley -- that we don't have to accept the status quo, that we don't have to absorbed by the machine and made a part of a mindless bureaucratic structure -- we expect better.

We expect better. We expect better from the people around us. We expect better from the people and the businesses that we work with. We expect better for the world. 

The Alliance: The Best Business Book I've Read in Several Years

On Tuesday, KQED's Forum program featured LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman talking about his new book, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age. After listening to part of the program -- I had to get into a meeting -- I found that I was interested enough to head straight to Amazon to find out more about the book. One Prime membership and two days later, the book arrived this morning. I finished it by lunchtime.

Without a doubt, this is one of the best business books that I've come across in a long time. I highly recommend it.

The basic premise of the book is a redefining of the employer-employee relationship, designed to address the modern business environment. Gone are the days of lifetime employment, but we still carry residual assumptions that corrupt aspects of the employer-employee relationship. The Alliance provides for a better social contract, defining a framework for dealing with employment periods as tours of duty with goals for advancing both the company and the employee's interests.

The Problem with Most Business Books
It's not unusual to come across a business book that catches my attention. An interesting idea or an insightful look into a technology or trend -- if it's wrapped in a good story -- can usually spark my thinking, sometimes enough to buy the book. At the same time, for as many books as I've bought in the past couple of years, I've actually finished few of them. Mostly, that's because, once you work your way through the core premise and you understand the framework, the other content is typically provided as supporting information and it's rather tedious to work through. Usually, after a couple of days of hacking through a few pages here and there, I find myself drawn into other projects, then I stop carrying the book, and soon it's collecting dust on the cabinet.

The Alliance was far more successful. It's well documented, with anecdotes and examples from a variety of businesses. The examples used are typically brief, not more than a page or two, sometimes as short as a casual reference. The flow is fast, the chapters are short and it moves with the pace of a tight presentation deck. But it gets better:

• More than just presenting a concept, the book provides a rough framework for implementing an approach. It's like reading a manual with exercises and example. There is some good take-away material here.
• While it maps out the framework, it doesn't get bogged down in process details. It's almost more of an executive overview of a policy handbook, rather than a tedious policy handbook.
• At the end of each chapter, the book provides links to a web site where you can get more content online. This is the way modern book publishing should be.
• Even the appendices include example documents that help provide inside into the process and the strategy. 

In the end, this is one you definitely should read. It even provides a great context for how the social network should fit into the culture of the business -- but you could probably see that coming from the Linked In folks.

Not that they're reading my blog, but a hat tip to Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh. This is an exceptional book you've put together here.

Weekend Shopping and the Challenges of Brick and Mortar

We were out and about this weekend with a couple of trips to the mall. It was an interesting reminder about how some stores still wrestle with brick and mortar versus online.

It may be because it's been a while since we'd been there, but the Sony store has a new home and a new style -- more like the Apple store. It seems targeted more around the showrooming experience now, which seems appropriate. We didn't go in, but from the outside it looked better.

I'd been looking for something online at Williams Sonoma, but I thought it would be worth checking the store to see if they matched the same price and 'gift' offer as online. While their web site says that they can't always do that, I was pleased to see them do that for the product that I was looking for. Unfortunately, they didn't have it in stock and checking their inventory system showed some IS/POS system problems. Fortunately for us, we live in an area with multiple Williams Sonoma locations, so we were able to buy the item at another store (which also had problems with their POS system), but I was equally surprised that the first store didn't offer to check stock in nearby locations. And, for all of you retail people out there, don't ask me if I'd like to order it online when I just came in and asked if your retail offer matched your online one.

I was also doing some book shopping over the weekend. Amazon didn't have stock. I thought, what the heck, I'll check Barnes and Noble. Sure enough, they had stock and a better price. Oh, and the offer in store pickup. Having been burned by their pricing approach in the past, I was curious if they'd updated their pricing to support online match in-store. I called. Nope. That might not be a big deal when you're talking about a paperback or a $20 book, but when you start getting up over $100 and a $50 price delta, it's over. Their brick and mortar just lost the sale -- for the B&M and the online business.

Steve Jobs as a Template? Who does that?

A while back, I came across this, Bio as Bible: Managers Imitate Steve Jobs from the Wall Street Journal. You don't have to go very far into the piece to get the idea -- it's an anecdotal tale of managers across the country who read the Steve Jobs bio and, subsequently, began to approach the ideas as dogma. The article leaves you with the impression that you're watching an episode of The Office and the boss has suddenly decided to start wearing black turtle necks.

Caveat emptor, I haven't read the Jobs biography, so I can't say whether I'll go finish the book and go straight to shopping for my own turtle necks wardrobe, but I don't expect that to be the result. I could be wrong. But my real focus here is on underlying essence of this imitation, on understanding good design, what makes art good, and why.

Let's take wine tasting as an example. Most of us are familiar with the vocabulary and ceremony associated with wine tasting. And while the vocabulary may seem artificial and pretentious to some, within the wine tasting culture it has meaning and purpose. Now, if you were to segment the wine community, you might start with some big chunks:

• Let's start with people who don't drink much wine or who aren't familiar with many varieties. For them, Two-buck Chuck is good enough -- they probably wouldn't be sensitive to subtleties and they certainly wouldn't pay a lot for them. They probably don't use wine tasting descriptions and the probably don't worry much about "rating systems". 
• I would probably put myself into a second group. I've tasted a lot of wine and used that as a basis for my preferences. I'm willing to spend some money on more expensive wines on occasion, but tend to make selections and second purchases based on how a wine matches my preferences. I don't use wine tasting vocabulary and I don't pay attention to ratings.
• At the upper end of the spectrum and people who spend a lot of money on wine and taste a lot of varieties. These people use the wine tasting vocabulary and they pay attention to rating systems. They make selections based on their tastes and preferences, but also understand how that vocabulary correlates to their preferences. They are probably collectors.
• Finally, you have the last set that I really want to talk about -- those people who use wine tasting vocabulary, who buy based on rating systems, price criteria, varietal and other characteristics, but who don't really understand or correlate those factors to an actual taste preference. These are the pretentious people who buy the most expensive wines or ones with the highest rating -- or maybe they only buy Pinot Noir because they watched Sideways. These are the people who would probably blindly drink Two-buck Chuck and describe it with flowery wine tasting vocabulary. 

It's this last group that we both love and hate. As marketers, we love them because they are so easily influenced by our efforts. As sales guys we love them, because in many ways that have sucker buyer stamped on their forehead. These are the people who deliver high margins because at the root of it, they don't have meaningful expectations.

Why don't they have meaningful expectations? Because they don't understand quality. Because the only qualities that they value are not related to form and function. They don't look at the world in that way.

Remember when, in the early days of the iPhone, RIM introduced it's own touchscreen phone? Part of the reason why these things come to market is because somebody somewhere said, "Hey, it does the same thing that ours does but it has a music player app store touch screen. We need a touch screen." It's not like the only difference was the touch screen, but how do you explain an entire, integrated landscape in a meeting?

Why is it that most copies are poor versions of the original? Well, going back to the Steve Jobs imitators, imagine if you could follow a Steve Jobs pattern, step for step, note for note. The best you could hope to achieve would still be an echo of the original. What you would miss are those moments of originality, of creative birth that produced many of the things that we look back on historically as unique. Why? Because your path to following the Steve Jobs recipe would be driven by "what would Steve do" instead of "what do I think is right". Hal Holbrook does a great Mark Twain, but he's not Samuel Clemens.

Imitation can be a great tool for learning. By repeating the steps in a recipe, you develop an understanding of the mechanics of cooking a dish. But until you understand the how and why of the recipe, you don't really own it. You don't make new, you just make. In the end, what did you learn from the recipe -- about the ingredients, about the process, about why the pieces fit together? This underlying learning process is the heart of what makes you good at something.

In business there is this idea that it's all simply recipe and process. If you can just make a smart phone with a touch screen, an app store and the apps that people like, you'll have an equivalent to the iPhone. Then, if you add a few more features that people like, maybe a memory slot, a faster processor or a removable battery, you'll have more features and you will sell more units than the iPhone. Maybe you understand the parts. Maybe you understand what the parts add up to. But if you can't see the bigger picture, the underlying connection for why those parts -- and those specific parts -- go together, you still don't understand.

To quote Frank Zappa from a 1984 issue of Guitar Player magazine:

What do you think happened in this country?
Well, two important things, and each one of them has only three letters: One was LSD, a chemical which is capable of turning a hippie into a yuppie, one of the most dangerous chemicals known to mankind. And the other is MBA. When people started taking MBA seriously, that was the beginning of the ruination of the American industrial society. When all decisions are based on an MBA's concept of numerical reality, you're in deep shit, because the only thing that can be judged as real is that which can be proved by a column of figures. And when all aesthetic decisions are turned over to these kinds of people, who use these criteria to make steering decisions for a company with no regard for people and no regard for what the product really is, and the only thing that matters is maximizing your profit, you have a problem. Because you can't have quality then; you cannot have excellence. Quality's expensive. I think most of these people that come from business schools have the desire to make sure everything is cheesy. That's what happens when you do things that way.

Of course, it's worth noting that in a lot of modern marketing, creativity and original content matter less than numerical performance. Consider web advertising. While copy and content may be a hook, the real measure (and the thing that you have to optimize on) is click-through and conversion. Not to say that there aren't more complex issues at work, simply that the issue isn't black and white. But hopefully, as people read the biography and begin to study the what and why of Steve Jobs, they find themselves drawn into the world of creativity and art. Hopefully, they find a deeper appreciation of aesthetic aspects and a greater tolerance for the differences that creative thinking brings. But mostly, let's just hope that it doesn't spawn a whole new generation of pretentious wine/design snobs who claim to know so much but who really understand so little.

Reflections on Freakanomics Radio Podcasts

Recently, I've been listening my way through the series of podcasts from the Freakanomics Radio team. If you aren't familiar with them, this is from the same guys that wrote Freakanomics and Superfreakanomics. The catchphrase that they use a lot is "exploring the hidden side of everything."

One of the themes that runs through most of the things that they explore is that, often, when we think about incentives that drive behavior, we underestimate some hidden incentives that actually have a powerful effect on behavior.

One example of this is highlighted in their episode on World Cup soccer. As part of their exploration of soccer, they talk about penalty shots and how the results correlate closely to game theory. At the same time, they point out that, statistically, penalty kicking players under-utilize a kick to the center that should result in more goals if they kicked the ball there. However, players are driven by the hidden incentive of not looking like an idiot if they kick the ball straight and the goalie just stands there and catches it.

What struck me with this is, in our daily lives, how often we are affected by people who are driven by the hidden incentive of not looking like an idiot. This incentive is drilled into us as we grow up. It's something that we learn when we answer questions in front of our class. It's something we are reminded of when we speak in meetings. It's something we participate in when we hide behind consensus.

Creativity, on the other hand, often flies in the face of the not looking like an idiot incentive. It's exploring an under-utilized, under-exploited path. Creativity is a high-wire act where a successful effort results in a goal but everything else falls short.

So the question you might ask yourself is, how many of your successes came as a result of ignoring the incentive of not looking like an idiot? How would you measure those accomplishments in the overall scope of your history? Is there a theme there?

Aftershock, Income Inequality, and Why Everyone is Angry at the Economy

The other day on NPR's Fresh Air, they had Robert Reich on, talking about his new book, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future. I found the interview both entertaining and informative. The basic thesis of the book is that, in terms of recovery from our current economic troubles, we're hosed. According to Reich, the underlying issue with the economy isn't just about banks or stimulus, it's about an income inequality and the impact that it's having on the overall economy. Reich goes back and highlights a figure from the Great Depression who addressed some of these issues, then points to some larger changes that would be needed in order to bring jobs back to the economy and purchasing power back the middle class.

One quote that I found particularly amusing, Reich pointed out that when they go to mainstream America and tell them that the recession ended back in June 2009, that people laugh at them. The people who are out of work, underwater on their mortgages, and struggling to make ends meet are keenly aware that if your indicators say that we're out of the recession, then your indicators suck.

This is something that is an underlying pain point for the current administration and one of the issues that's driving trends as we move toward the election in November. Regardless of what the economic dashboards say, regardless of what the stock market numbers say, the Main Street economy sucks. But there is actually a bigger theme behind this.

For some time now, there has been the adoption of this idea by the media and in political circles in Washington that if the stock market numbers are high and the market appears strong, then the economy must be healthy, happy, and thriving. The Bush administration used this same logic to make a case for the performance of their economic policies, despite poor employment numbers and a generally lifeless economy. It's also a core message to the whole concept of 'trickle-down' economics, "they are doing well and it's only a matter of time before that starts to trickle down your way. Wait for it... Wait for it..."

But one job is not always equal to one job. Remember when they wanted to make "burger assembler at a fast food restaurant" count as a manufacturing job -- it makes it easier to mask the gushing flow of manufacturing jobs leaving the local economy.

When the financial system was on the edge of collapse, our government rushed in the paramedics to rescue the financial services industry. We bailed out Wall Street. We bailed out GM. We bailed out the banks and AIG. But when it came to saving the suffering middle class through programs like extended unemployment or mortgage relief, the people we elected did little to help. Those initiatives sank and drowned. For home owners that found themselves in loans that were underwater, there has been no adjustment, no correction, no bail out, just a continuing parade of foreclosures and terrible unemployment. This sense of inequity is part of what's driving the anger.

On Marketing and Message
If you look at all of that anger and the energy behind it, then connect it to messaging, you can see some of the challenges that the current candidates are facing. For Democrats, they position themselves relative to the bail out and say, "see, we saved the economy," but that doesn't match the reality that people are experiencing or perceive that they are experiencing. It doesn't really matter whether there was a victory on paper or not -- it's like telling someone who's computer was infected with a virus, "I've been able to rebuild your operating system, but all of your files, your photos and your data are gone."

Meanwhile, Republicans say, "see, we told you the bail out was a bad idea. They just made matters worse." But with marketing and message, people gloss over history, so it doesn't really matter that the collapse and the TARP bailout both took place under the a Republican president, nor does it matter that when it came to the stimulus bail out, Republicans sat on the economic Titanic and fought to prevent Main Street access to lifeboats.  Whether or not Republicans offer a solution or a recipe for anything other than a return to the policies of the previous administration doesn't really matter, instead there is an audience that can connect with single message that bailout equals bad idea.

If you follow Reich's thesis, real resolution won't happen until this income inequality can be addressed. And with most of the current approaches centered around "the health of Wall Street" as though it were an engine instead of an indicator, the larger outlook will probably remain bleak (or worse) for some time.

The Great Irony of the Bailout
The great irony of the bailout is that people that directly benefited from it are also angry and frustrated. Here is an interesting segment from the episode of This American Life titled 'Crybabies' that aired recently on KQED. Continue through the intro on 'Outrage' to this first section on Wall Street. Here's a synopsis from their site:

Act One. Wall Street: Money Never Weeps.
Ira with Planet Money economics correspondent Adam Davidson on why—even after everything President Obama has done to save Wall Street, actions which have led to record profits and bonuses—Wall Street seems ungrateful. Adam and producer Jane Feltes head out to a Wall Street bar where they're told by three finance guys that there's no reason to thank the President for saving their jobs. Planet Money is a co-production of This American Life and NPR News. (14 minutes)  

A Populist Pressure Cooker 
Overall, a poor economy stresses its constituents. People are unhappy and looking for change, but finding themselves powerless to make changes. Stuck in an underpaid, overworked job with increasing productivity expectations? If there are no jobs, you have no freedom to change jobs or find a better situation, and there is no pressure on the employer to make your work environment better. And like a stove with the burner on high, tensions and stress within our society keep increasing.

Take California as an example. We have a situation where the laws and ballot initiatives have mandated levels for the majority of spending for the state, making real change impossible. Meanwhile, term limits, super-majority requirements and the demographics of the legislature mean that most budget 'problems' get rewritten and pushed into the future. Several years ago, frustrations with this situation exploded in the recall and the election of a populist reformer. And yet, despite publicity, a famous name, and host of proposed reform programs, nothing really changed and no problems were solved. Nowadays, you often hear proposals of revolutionary reform like a Constitutional convention, but I haven't seen the signs of a real movement for anything like that. And so, with politics what you have now are people spinning messages of reform on top of a system and product that isn't really going to change fundamentally.

In Reich's interview, he noted that the current policies were not reforming the economy sufficiently to change the imbalances highlighted in his book. However, he was optimistic that, over time the government would come to understand that the reforms-to-date were not sufficient to correct the bigger picture, and begin implementing stronger reforms. I don't agree with him on this point. A conspiracy theorist might suggest some sort of overarching system that benefits from keeping the pressure cooker on high, but I think that the truth is much simpler. Like a business with shrinking markets and uninspired products (fill in your example here), government and politicians intrinsically avoid bold vision or substantial change. Imagine if we had some sort of entrepreneurial start-up incubator model for new government policy and reform.

Multi-tasking, Distracted Driving, and How We Pay Attention

NPR's Science Friday program this week featured an intestesting segment on How We Pay Attention. As part of the show, they included these two video tests available on their site.

Watch the first video, then watch the second. I wound up wrestling with frame drops from YouTube, so you may want to try and let the entire video load before you watch it.

1. Here's the first video:




2. Here's the second video:


Here's a link to the Science Friday segment on attention on NPR.
Here's a link to the book that's referenced in the segment. I won't mention the title as it might work like a spoiler for your video tests. FYI, there's more great stuff on their web site.

Bait and Switch: How I Almost Bought a Book at Barnes & Noble, Then They Lost My Business

So I'm doing some analysis and putting together a roadmap presentation for future implementation of Salesforce.com. In doing some research and trying to build some graphics, I came across an interesting site that lead me to an interesting book, Enterprise Architecture As Strategy.

The more that I looked at the book, the more I realized that I was interesting in buying it. A quick found that Amazon offered the lowest price, but Barnes and Noble wasn't that much more expensive and they offered the option of in-store pick-up. Since we're on the front end of a 3-day weekend, it seemed like a great opportunity to catch up on some reading. The web site noted that one of the local Barnes & Noble stores had the book in stock. However, as I started to reserve a copy for in-store pick-up, I noticed that the price had jumped from the competitive online price, back to the list price which was significantly higher.

Just to check that this wasn't some sort of error, I made a quick call to the store and they confirmed that the price would be higher for in-store pick-up. The store would not honor the lower price.

Needless to say, I'm not going to buy the book from Barnes & Noble. Further, now that I understand their pricing policies and the difference between their online price and their in-store price, I don't expect to shop there again. Don't get me wrong -- I appreciate the concept of a brick and mortar bookstore, of being able to wander and browse. I don't even mind paying a premium for a good in-store brick-and-mortar experience. The biggest problem that I have is that, with this online reservation system, I've essentially bought the product online and, as a convenience for both B&N and myself, I make the effort to go pick it up.

It's possible that this pricing strategy makes sense when you add up all of the costs in some complex number and accounting analysis, but in plain old consumer speak, the underlying message from B&N reads like this:

We have a great resource for finding books online. We are also very competitive with other book stores on the internet. But we're better than the internet because we have actual stores, so you can come pick up your book. Oh, we forgot to mention -- if you are going to make the extra effort to come to our store and get your book, we're going to charge you more for your extra effort.

Other retailers have found ways to successfully sell online and brick and mortar without using this two-tiered pricing scheme. Apple, Best Buy, and Costco are just a few of the companies that operate effectively in both worlds. In that way, the Barnes & Noble pricing strategy may be one of the best indicators that B&N's business strategy still hasn't adapted the Internet.

In some ways, B&Ns approach seems like a surrender to the idea that their retail store experience offers no value add, no opportunity to upsell or to add items to the customer's cart. Now it's likely that they have done much more in-depth studies on their customer's behavior, but it truly seems like their pricing strategy was designed by someone who was more worried about in-store customers using the online system to cut into their margins. Compare that with Apple, where you can schedule an appointment online for an in-store shopping experience.

Po Bronson on Techcrunch TV

Here's a great collection of video interviews with Po Bronson, author of The Nudist on the Late Shift: And Other True Tales of Silicon Valley. Lately he's been focused on education and creativity. This post on Techcrunch features five video clips that are worth watching.

Techcrunch -- Po Bronson: “That’s why academics are so boring” [VIDEO]

Enjoy!

Copyrights, Content, and Digital Rights Management

Not to go to far down this rabbit hole, but there's an aspect of copyrights and digital rights management that was on my mind earlier today. I was thinking about some articles that I had been reading, helping a friend that's working on a project for her MBA program. Specifically, I was thinking about writing a blog post talking about one of the articles and thinking about how to cite and credit the author. Somewhere in that process, I began thinking about how I came to read the article -- the method of transmitting that content to me. That's when this thought struck me.

Remember Books? Consider books in the era of DRM...
How many times have you read a book, then loaned it to your friend (or visa versa). While only one copy of the book was purchased, it's entirely possible that it may be passed around to several readers. Somehow, despite the author's loss for not having sold a copy to each reader, the book business has managed to hang around for several hundred years. It's survived through the advent of radio, television and the Internet (maybe). It's survived that crazy, no-profit content sharing system -- libraries. What's more, even in the face of little or no profits potential profits to authors, people still write books.

Depending on which direction you're looking at it from, there are certain aspects surrounding the debate of content and rights that can border on the absurd. While it's probably pretty easy for a pro-DRM industry spokeman to shred some of the parallels with books and libraries, consider this recent contrasting example from the digital world.

In a recent TechCrunch (I think) post, I read where some group that publishes to the Kindle, (Amazon's Wireless Reading Device), changed their permissions when it comes to text-to-speech. So, while the Kindle is capable of reading and speaking the text, at least one publisher considered that a threat to their audio book business and canceled that service for their publications. Oh, and according to the Techcrunch post, it also affects any publications that you have already "purchased".

Somehow I don't see the library or the bookstore retroactively canceling a characteristic of the item that you just bought. There's a lot more food for thought down this path, so I'll let you wander and snack as you see fit.

You Could Probably Hear The 'Doh' From Where You Are

Here's a quick update on a previous post -- a post correction/addendum. In my A brief history of the financial crisis post, I referenced an article by Michael Lewis. Then, as I was clicking through Amazon, trying to secure some last minute Christmas gifts, I noticed my Amazon search history and the "you might also be interested in" section. Since I referenced the link to Liar's Poker, the book mentioned in the article, Amazon reminded me of all of the other books that Lewis has written. In case you don't remember who he is, one of these book titles might jog your memory.

Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity
The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game
The Real Price of Everything: Rediscovering the Six Classics of Economics
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
The Money Culture
The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story
Losers: The Road to Everyplace but the White House
Next: The Future Just Happened

If the sort order seems a bit chaotic, it's just following the order that came up when I searched Amazon. When the artwork showed up, it was one of those -- Oh, that Michael Lewis! And that was about the time when you heard the 'Doh'.

The First 90 Days follow up

I just wanted to follow up on the previous post. I was discussing this topic with one of my marketing friends and the resulting conversation left me thinking that I might have been a bit unclear on my take on the whole 90-day plan. Put simply, these are good things to review, great things to understand, but for the most part, this isn't a formula. These are guidelines and strategies for functioning in dynamic situations. It's my believe that, most of the time, if you're following a hard-and-fast plan, you've already made decisions and judgements that aren't going to map well to the dynamics of a specific situation.

Good managers have an ability to anticipate problems so that they can plan and avoid them. Better managers can adapt and overcome problems -- be they anticipated or not -- and be successful.

The First 90 Days and the 90-day Plan: Does This Mean That You Know What You're Doing?

Another book that I was pawing through recently -- The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels by Michael Watkins -- has been sputtering around in my thoughts in recent weeks. While I've only given the book a quick skim so I can't fully endorse the contents or the writing, I found several of the key points easy to extract and interesting to consider. The basic premise of the book is -- as the subtitle suggests -- a strategy roadmap for approaching new jobs, promotions, and changes in responsibilities. The author breaks new opportunities down into four basic categories -- start-up, turn-around, sustain, and realignment -- or something along those lines. Since I haven't read it all the way through, I'm hesitant to write much about it though.

More to the point, when I looked on Amazon, this one is neither the first nor the only 90-day plan book. Amazon also lists a 100-day plan book (does this leave you a 10 days behind?), a 12-week book (it sounds longer, but I think it's actually shorter). Actually, another quick skim of the Amazon page shows this quote as the first sentence of the book, "THE PRESIDENT of the United States gets 100 days to prove himself; you get 90." I guess that tells the 100-day book guy.

Do You Need to have a 90-Day Plan to get a Job?
Recently, I was speaking with one of the execs that I work with, and he was talking about his recent interviews for a Director-level position that he was attempting to fill. He mentioned that several of the candidates that he interviewed had 90-day plans. So, my question is, is this some new portfolio benchmark that's been set or is it just a new piece of fashionable vocabulary for your portfolio that currently moving through the business community? I say that only in so far as this is really one of the first times that I've heard that as a specific topic of discussion during the interview process.

Don't get me wrong, I agree with one of the fundamental concepts in The First 90 Days -- that you need to have an understanding of the rhythms and processes needed in assessing and establishing your position in order to be able to be successful. It's basically the same thing when you get ready to cook a meal -- you need to understand your available ingredients, map a plan for the food your going to prepare, and then, frequently, proceed through the your prep work before an ingredient ever touches a pan. This may be surprising news for some. In the same way, when you're stepping into a product marketing role and the product is ramping up for launch, if you can't answer the call quickly, then you're not going to be successful.

Having provide marketing services for several years as an outside consultant, I understand how important it is to be able to build a quick understanding of a set of business problems and to be able to build a path to success. When you're brought it as an external vendor, you don't usually have the luxury of saying -- let me spend three months understanding your culture and adapting my practices and my success strategies to your operations. That being said, you're also in trouble if you go in saying something like, "your entire infrastructure and your approach to marketing sucks and it needs a complete overhaul. This is going to be a 3-year, multimillion dollar project." (yeah, uh huh... don't call us...)

So, going back to the interview process and the 90-day plan thing -- what exactly are you supposed to be presenting to your prospective employer? Here are the ten strategies that are covered in The First 90 Days.

1. Promote yourself
2. Accelerate your learning
3. Match strategy to situation
4. Secure early wins
5. Negotiate success
6. Achieve alignment
7. Build your team
8. Create coalitions
9. Keep your balance
10. Expedite everyone

This probably goes without saying, but if you're in an interview and you tell someone that this is your 90-day plan, you're in trouble. What's more, if your prospective employer hires you based on outlining this as your plan, you're probably in even bigger trouble.

Here's the real issue to keep in mind with your first 90 days and your 90-day plan -- you're prospective employer / manager is hiring you to solve a problem or a series of problems. Like solution selling, they have a pain point and their big focus is how to address that issue. Before you even get to your first 90 days, your vision needs to include an understanding of those pain points and the desired solution.

The thing that troubles me the most about the various 90-day plan books is that some people might know only know enough about 90-day plans to think of these techniques as a recipe as opposed to a series of strategies (for those of you who might not have found yourself immersed in business culture, business people are notorious for not reading). One of the things that I think really drives this message home is Michael Watkin's blog. In one series of posts, he builds a case study for a woman that is promoted within the organization and the challenges that she faces going forward. Check out the post and the comments -- there is a great discussion of what kinds of factors she should consider as she goes forward, mapping a strategy to fit the unique requirements of her situation. And if you want a counter to that post, consider what would happen if she followed her own thinking as though it were a precise recipe to be implemented.

So, back to the interview -- how should you answer the 90-day plan question? Or perhaps the better question is, how should you present your understanding of the principles that roll up in The First 90 Days? For me, I find that the key is in presenting yourself and your ideas in a way that demonstrates your understanding for both what you are doing and your ability to analyze and adapt those processes depending upon the requirements you face. But turning the question around -- if you were the hiring manager and you asked a candidate for their 90-day plan, are you looking for a formula for what to do... or are you looking for the reassurance that your candidate knows what they are doing and will be successful -- and make you successful?

Another Great Book -- Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin

I picked up a copy of Seth Godin's Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing Out of Sync? a couple of weeks ago and I've started working my way through it. Let me start by saying that this book is an excellent roll-up that helps translate many converging factors and explain the strategic vision for where these trends are driving marketing practices. It seems like I have been trying to explain these same concepts to some more traditional audiences for a couple of years now -- and this book effectively summarizes those points.

When I first saw the description and quotes on Brand Autopsy, I was fairly impressed with the overall messages. On several occassions, I've tried to explain these concepts to different people, but often in trying to explain these concepts -- particularly across international audiences -- I've found the "meatball sundae" concept to be the biggest obstacle in trying to connect with the audience. But don't let that stop you from picking up this book -- it really does tie a number of these important concepts together.

Consider this simple difference between old marketing and new marketing in terms of advertising. Google adwords versus a television commercial (or advertising in the movie theater, a pop-up window on a web site, or a host of other "interrupting" advertising techniques). When you search for something on Google, Adwords presents a host of "related" sponsored links. The links are keyed to the term that you searched, and Google's program rejects terms that don't respond well and are appear to be not well-matched. Contrast this with the interruption, the advertising message that isn't in context, that you didn't ask for. When you get these in email, their simply termed Spam.

Anyway, it's a great book, an easy read, and I recommend that you check it out!

Another Great Quote from "Inside Steve's Brain"

I found some time to read this morning and I came across this excellent quote about creativity from Inside Steve's Brain.

"Creativity is just connecting things," Jobs told Wired magazine. "When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things..."

Inside the Inside Steve's Brain Book

I've started reading Inside Steve's Brain by Leander Kahney. I first picked it up based on this recommendation from Brand Autopsy. When I first picked the book up in the bookstore, I noticed that I've already seen a lot of the content posted in bunch of recent articles and extracts across the web -- you may have noticed a recent burst of articles or interviews on how Apple manages the design process and how Steve Jobs manages the business.
This is a great book. Not only is it an easy read, but it leaves you with a number of those "why can't I do that" or implement that or work in an environment that approaches things that way. It's that way of making something unique and intangible feel like it's within reach.
In keeping on the recent creativity theme, I thought I would pull these two excerpts from chapter 2 in the book.

Creativity in art and technology is about individual expression. Just as an artist couldn't produce a painting by a focus group, Jobs doesn't use them either. Jobs can't innovate by asking a focus group what they want--they don't know what they want.

Whitney said Sony would never have invented the Walkman if it had listened to its users. The company actually conducted a lot of research before releasing it. "All of the marketing data said that the Walkman was going to fail. It was unambiguous. No one would buy it. But [founder Akio] Marita pushed it through anyway. He knew. Jobs is the same. He has no need for user groups because he is a user experience expert."

Something to keep in mind as you try to balance creativity with the lowest common denominator.
Oh, and on that note, here's one more -- this one is from chapter 3, quoting a 1996 interview with Steve Jobs in Wired magazine:

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works... To design something really well, you have to get it. (emphasis mine)

I recommend it!

Juice: The Creative Fuel That Drives World Class Marketers

Here is another book recommendation and another trip down the creativity thread. The book is Juice: The Creative Fuel That Drives World-Class Inventors. This one's about inventors, inventions and inventive thinking, but what's really going on here is an exploration of the addictive nature of creative energy and some of the structure and process around creating and inventing. The book is part technology history, part business book, and part recipe, but it's a great read.

Good Ideas and the Lowest Common Denominator - What Do You Do When They Just Don't Get It?

What happens when you have one of those ideas, those concepts that are so revolutionary, so innovative, that the people you work with just don't get it? Do you hold on to it? Do you let it go? And how about the people that you work with -- how do they handle new ideas and concepts? Do they question anything new? And how about your corporate culture -- are you rewarded for innovative ideas? Is there an organizational path for digesting and implementing innovation?

One of my favorite books about creativity is Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving With Grace by Gordon MacKenzie. Gordon worked for many years at Hallmark, and the book is a wonderful exploration of the challenges of dealing with creativity in the corporate world. I love the Hairball book, but my real life experiences tell me that most business cultures are not particularly receptive to fostering creative environments. In practical terms, what this means is that, as an idea engine, most of us frequently wind up in situations where the wheels are spinning but the idea doesn't advance. And if your work environment is a consensus culture, you probably won't get traction until you reach the lowest common denominator in terms of shared vision -- and that threshold may actually equate to the death of your concept.

Before you throw in the towel, there are a couple of things to keep in mind:

1. Ideas that are impossible to implement may not be good.
2. Your idea may improve during the process of explanation, analysis and consensus building.
3. Lowest common denominator doesn't necessarily equate to dumbing your idea down -- it may simply require one bridge across a single gap in understanding to gain a wider grasp of the vision.
   

Remember, when you are looking for a shared vision, it isn't necessary for everyone to see the goal from your eyes, all that is needed is to see the goal, even if their vision comes from a different angle -- once you have a shared vision of the goal, you are simply debating about implementation.

If you come up with unique ideas, then you already understand that this process is never easy. In that moment of your idea, what you are essentially telling your audience is "here is something that you didn't know, that you didn't think of, or that you need to figure out how to interpret and understand." If the disconnect is like a joke, most people don't want to be the guy who doesn't get the joke, it's much better for them if the real problem is that the joke just sucks. And to make matters worse, they probably have a lot more at stake personally than whether they laugh. So, as you try to bridge these gaps in understanding, one key point is that the fewer number of conceptual leaps your audience needs to make, the more receptive they are likely to be.

To bridge conceptual gaps, it's important to understand where the gaps come from. One way of visualizing an idea is like a patchwork quilt. In your mind, you have connected one conceptual piece of cloth with another and another, forming a much larger fabric. The threads that tie those pieces together and the order that you have connected them are something that has taken place inside your mind. This is the magic of your unique idea. As others try to grasp your idea, they may be missing thread, they may be missing pieces of cloth, they may be missing the order -- or in some cases, they may actually see the whole quilt but think that it, like your joke, sucks.

The more of your vision that the audience already has inside of their head, the greater the likelihood that you'll be able to bridge the idea gap. So, if you are dealing with an audience of people who have a shared experience, it probably isn't a stretch to find commonality across the topic of that project (eg. 'maybe we should add an FAQ section to this document'). If, on the other hand, your concept is outside of those perceptual frames, you're asking your audience to assemble your conceptual quilt with a lot of missing pieces. This type of conceptual alienation is particularly easy to create when you're dealing with specialized topics or drawing from personal or cultural references.

Another big factor in bridging concept gaps is uniquely audience-based. Some people are more tolerant of ambiguity than others. I'll probably touch on this more in a later post (there are a wealth of great resources about this topic out there), but it suffices to say that tolerance for ambiguity is a key part of creativity, and that also means being able to make the leap to understand your concept. What this means is that, to find commonality, you have to understand your audience's ability to tolerate ambiguity enough to be able to shape how you guide them across conceptual gaps. This may mean adjusting your presentation or withholding chunks of information to avoid overwhelming your audience with too many points to connect. To add to the challenge, while creative people tolerate ambiguity, business tends to prefer organization and structure. This means that, as a marketer, you must constantly balance the business order with the creative chaos and translate the whole thing into simple elements with limited variables.

Finally, one other thing to keep in mind as you try to find common conceptual ground. The strongest ideas that people have are going to be the ones that they discover and experience on their own. Rather than presenting the entire structure of your idea, if you can help bring your audience to the point where they can turn on the light themselves, their belief in and endorsement of the concept will be much stronger.