Assumptions

I've been in Texas for a little over a year, and I've been frustrated by lack of options in talk radio. You have a choice: conservative or ultra-conservative. I kept looking for public radio station. I looked all over the am dial. First mistake: assuming that because 820 WOSU was am, so would the Texas version. Wrong.

What things do you take for granted? Customers? Features? Perceived benefit? What would happen if you assumed nothing?

Corporate Inertia and Jujitsu

Visual thinking for the day:)

Ok, so, big corporations are... well, big. Brilliant insight, I know. Bear with me. They're big, change-resisting, money-making machines. But, at some point they were small, nimble and entrepreneurial. 

Jujitsu is a martial art based on the idea of  "using an attacker's energy against him, rather than directly opposing it."

At what point does a company shift from its original entrepreneurial culture to corporate incrementalism? When does it shift from creating to maintaining? When does inertia take over? I'm guessing it has something to do with number of employees & setting up managerial processes, etc. But, can you ever go back to the creating? Should you?

What can we motley rebels-- we intrapraneurs do to learn some sweet corporate jujitsu moves?

Profit vs. Greed

Wall Street is a mess. Obviously. And amid all the fear and flagellation is a fight over appropriate CEO compensation. One side says they get too much, the other says they get what they're worth. A frequently used “what they’re worth” arguments goes something like this: “Yeah, but what is $70M as a percent of net profit?!” That may be accurate—$70M is a small percentage of, say, $7B—but it’s not valid. It redirects attention away from the fundamental question: what is the purpose of business? (see number 9). The assumption in the “percentage” argument is that business’ primary purpose is to generate profit—as much as possible. To quote Michael Douglas in Wall Street: “Greed is good.”

But greed is not an effective, sustainable strategy—in the end, you’ll take too much and lose everything.

What if, instead, we got back to basics? “Business” began because someone was trying to make the world a better place. Trying to make life a little more live-able. And they were good at it: they could make their widget/service for less effort than the value we got out of it.

Profit! 

Then we got distracted by all that shiny money. Don't get me wrong! There’s nothing inherently bad about money, or even wanting it. Profit is good. Greed is not.

Simple Question

On his blog last week, Tim Brown (IDEO bacon-double-big-cheese) tells a story about an insulated coffee mug he received as a gift. Then he asks a ridiculously simple question: "is this a product or an experience?" 

It's a simple question, but it has a profound and fundamental effect on product development and management. Too often, we focus on the initial purchase part of consumer behavior. What would happen if we spent more time on the rest-- the experience part? What if, when developing a speech & language assessment, rather than spending a disproportionate amount of time and money on marginal technical improvements, we made it more fun for the kid to take? Easier for the assessor to track the kid's improvement over time? Found simpler, more emotionally-intelligent ways to tell the parents what's going on?

Those are big what-ifs, but could they be sustainable competitive advantages? By asking Tim Brown's simple, fundamental question, could you swim out of your red-ocean strategy and into the calm, azure waters of a blue ocean?

Web 3.0

Over @ Indexed, Jessica Hagy has a brilliantly simple explanation of Web 2.0:



So... if that's Web 2.0... then Web 3.0 obviously will add the Z axis... or, as I like to call it, the "Total World Domination" axis.

a fighting force of extra-ordinary magnitude!

I don't like the idea of crushing the competition into an pulsating pile of people-pulp. But I worry that if I don't, they may not be so kind in return. Insert bland reference to jujitsu/kung-fu/etc. here. My problem with crushing the competition-- or even using the competition against itself (think jujitsu)--is that the customer is left as a spectator at best and/or collateral damage at worst. So if your focus is 3 months at a time and a 10Q is your Holy Writ, sweep the leg johnny! (80s gold @ 1:40 and 4:05) But if you truly want to provide a great product/service/experience for your users, maybe you should think about collaboration as a competitive strategy. think about what you're good at, what you're bad at, and what you love to do-- your strengths, weaknesses and your "bliss." now do the same for your competition. if there's 100% overlap, maybe this isn't the way to go. But, if there are areas of differentiation...