With the announcement of Apple’s iPad tablet, you may have observed jabs between Apple and Adobe regarding the support of Flash Video on Apple’s iPod/iPhone/iPad platform. Though this article is not about this specific dispute, it has been inspired by the conflict.

Here is a quick backgrounder on the issue. Adobe’s Flash Video (originally developed by Macromedia) is a container format that is used for delivering video over the Internet. Many popular sites use this format to embed video and other content on the Web, such as YouTube, Hulu, Facebook, and Flash-based online games. Through Adobe Flash Player and browser plug-ins, Flash-Video is made available to users. Putting it mildly, Apple has no plans to support Flash on its iPod/iPhone family of products, while Adobe continues to push for its adoption. Instead, Apple has been pushing the HTML5 standard with H.264. For those that are interested, check out the Daring Fireball’s summary on the topic: Apple, Adobe, and Flash.

There are numerous examples of competing technologies: VHS vs. Betamax, Blu-Ray vs. HD DVD, GSM vs. CDMA, .Net vs. J2EE, various flavors of Unix and wireless standards, open vs. DRM, MP3 vs. AAC, AC vs. DC (no, not the music group but Tesla vs. Edison)… In many cases, competing technologies encourage innovation, arguably, sometimes at the cost of building a rich ecosystem. At the same time it is not uncommon for users to experience confusion over compatibility and interoperability, such as in the case with having too many multi-media formats and having to choose a player to match the video format. However, as a technology becomes more attractive, it will see a higher adoption rate, and increasing compatibility and interoperability with others as its ecosystem becomes richer.

This is all good, but as a technology company where do you put your money? As our computing infrastructure becomes more complex and interconnected, your customers are now looking for a total system experience: high-level of system performance and interoperability with others. With this, you need to not only control your technology but also influence and direct related technology decisions with your partners and competitors. To do this, you need to evaluate your technology strategy and decisions within the context of the purpose of your business, technology attractiveness and your ecosystem.  (more…)

I have been blogging since October of 2006. Below are my top 10 articles since the start of this blog. What do you think? What else should I write about?

1. Strategy 101: Revisiting low-cost leadership with Dell
2. How to identify forces impacting your innovation
3. Metrics gone bad and steps to recovery
4. Good, bad and ugly: Organizational silos
5. Best practices: SWOT analysis revisited
6. Strategy 101: What is your core competency?
7. Effective strategies for surviving culture tax
8. Create value at every touch point
9. Strategy 101: Characteristics of disruptive technologies — Wii has bad graphics!
10. Intrapreneurs: Navigate the corporate maze for innovation

“An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea.”

–Buddha

We all have ideas… They come out of nowhere: in the shower, while driving, over coffee, reading newspapers… But, without taking the time to develop your ideas, they are nothing but a thought, a blink in time.

In this blog, I’ll share my 5-step process of taking an idea and transforming it into a business concept blueprint. The goal of this exercise is to engage your thinking muscles. Here is a quick overview of the steps.

1. Dive into your problem space to refine your vision
2. Chisel out your opportunity and state your mission
3. Map out your product/service concept and strategy
4. Explore the profit potential
5. Write down your next steps and action plans

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I previously discussed the challenges of building a successful strategy, and key areas where you need to build a foundation for your strategic plans to be successful.

From experience, I have seen strategies fail at various stages and for various reasons. Some common threads were:

• lack of ownership/sponsorship as the manager moved on to bigger & better things;
• organization’s inability to change;
• lack of excitement, momentum, push and motivation;
• poor transfer between functional groups;
• organization not willing to take risks;
• decision process and information flow is f*#!?d up;
• inability to move from powerpoint slides to real-life execution: conflicting interests, values and priorities;

This blog is focused on factors that are key to successful execution of your strategy.
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This is a personal story and a reflection on the separation that exists between a company’s online and physical retail stores. Given current economic conditions, companies have to be more customer focused and look to continuously integrate many facets of their businesses, including creating a linkage between their customers and suppliers. Through this, they can create a continuous cycle that delivers exceptional customer experience which will become a key competitive advantage as the world continues to become flatter and cheaper. Now to the story and reflections…
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I just read from ABI Research that HP is exiting the HDTV business. If I had known about this when I wrote the article on Strategy 101: A Look at Positioning Through Apple’s MacBook, I would have certainly mentioned it. I know that HP engineers great products; I had the privilege to be part of the HP team. Which makes it all the harder to watch these failed attempts at transitioning into to markets that they are not positioning themselves well for. Hopefully these failed attempts will translate to something truly great in the near future. From Michael Wolf:

HP’s MediaSmart TVs have been fairly well reviewed, but that doesn’t translate into having consumers buy them. I often advise these types of vendors to start a wholly new brand when they are entering the market, since this allows consumer to develop their own fresh connotations around this new brand, instead of bringing whatever connotations have been associated with brands that may scream “IT” or “PC” rather than “great living room experience”. After all, who would have thought three years ago Vizio would gain a substantial amount of HDTV market share in the US,. while HP, Dell and Gateway would all flounder?

Technorati Tags: marketing, positioning, HP

“Positioning starts with a product. A piece of merchandise, a service, a company, an institution or even a person… But positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect. That is, you position the product in the mind of the prospect.”
–Ries & Trout; Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, 20th Anniversary Edition

The fact is, our world is noisy and getting noisier by the day. Positioning can help to cut through the clutter and the noise. Positioning enables a company to establish itself in the minds of its customers, and shows how the firm fits within the competitive landscape. What comes to your mind when you hear “Think different” or “Highly advanced yet simple to use“?

“Being all things to all people is a recipe for mediocrity and below average performance.”
–Michael Porter

Ignoring the concept of positioning could either lead the firm to take on its competitors head on, or appear as if they are everything for anyone. Neither is effective. Remember Zune as the iPod killer? It is through positioning we can strategize how our strengths will help create a winning situation for us. And, it is through positioning that we touch up every tangible aspect of the product, price, place and promotion to support the overall strategy.

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We live in a world of constant change, where firms need to focus on their operational bottom line more than ever. Yet, at the same time, our customers are not just judging us on our products, price and service, but also on our social and environmental impact. It is now all about our triple bottom line: financial, environmental and social performance.

Lets review innovation and sustainability definitions from previous posts.

• Innovation is about the implementation of a new idea for the purpose of creating value: value for the firm and value for the consumer.
• Sustainability is achieving outcomes that can be maintained indefinitely without depleting the support system or endangering present and future needs.

With that, it only makes sense to incorporate sustainability and sustainable business and management practices to our innovation process, and more importantly ensure it is the foundational principle of our innovation management activities. To refresh, innovation management is focused on managing and directing the firm’s resources and energy utilized for innovation to generate successful economic and competitive rewards.

As always, we have to tailor the concept of sustainability to our situation at hand. So, instead of taking a cookie cutter approach, this article highlights key areas to take into account as you are incorporating sustainability strategy into your innovation management activities. As each industry, technology, culture, target customer, and location have their own unique social and environmental challenge, customizing and developing your sustainability strategy will require planning and time.

In case you are questioning the need to incorporate sustainability strategy into your innovation management activities, let me repeat… Developing sustainable innovation management strategy is all about moving from traditional, resource intensive processes to methods that uses fewer resources while maximizing value. While it may not be obvious, studies have shown that sustainable development ultimately reduces development costs in the long haul, such as in the case of more optimized and environmentally friendly packaging.

Your innovation management activities are mainly founded on four key areas: culture, people/talent, technology/product and process. You can start identifying potential opportunities and sustainability issues in each of these areas by starting conversations and asking questions within your organization. As you are building your bigger picture, also use this opportunity to conduct your sustainability assessment, as it is important to understand where you currently stand in each of these areas.

• Culture — Sustainability is not just about managing the status quo more efficiently; it is also about building a culture that is mindful, compassionate about its impacts to society and the environment, and empowered to take action to improve. Global awareness of diverse cultural and ecological impacts, overall ownership and accountability, organizational learning, how well it can act is all part of building a culture that embraces sustainable choices.
• People/Talent — Globalization, resource shortages and demographic changes require your corporate sustainability agenda to incorporate your people policies. How you attract and retain talent, how your people internalize and act on your sustainability goals, how you enable your workforce to reduce its travel carbon footprint via telecommuting or video-conferencing programs, and how you sustain and nurture their creativity should all be incorporated into your sustainability strategy.
• Process — For a very generic term, process incorporates many different activities that take your innovation from idea to dissemination and beyond. For each of those activities, determine where you can make your process more sustainable and repeatable, without requiring significant resources. Ensure design and process innovation is part of your core competency, so that you are continuously looking for ways to build more sustainable products and technologies.
• Technology/Product — Evaluate every aspect of your technology and product life cycle to determine how you can incorporate sustainability strategies. In your analysis, make sure to include your value chain and your ecosystem evaluation.

In order to prioritize, start with a good understanding of what aspects of your products and services have an environmental or social component. Here are some starting discussion points:

• How/where can I reduce my environmental footprint?
• Product life cycle: Incorporate what-if scenarios to make aspects of your product more green. Redefine end-of-life concepts so there is less landfill impact. Utilize materials and processes that are more eco-friendly. And make sure to incorporate your evaluation of marketing communications.
• Customer support and service: Enable your customers to be greener: recycling programs, reduced packaging, sustainable upgrade programs. Make it easy for your customers to be green.
• Operations management: Analyze your manufacturing and transportation processes to reduce impact to natural resources. Innovate new process where applicable, such as ‘why doesn’t Amazon group my separate orders placed on the same day, and ship them all together?’
• Incorporate 4Rs across your organization, technology and products: refuse, reduce and reuse first, then as a last resort, recycle.
• Your ecosystem: Evaluate your value chain and see how your partners are handling sustainable processes, such as with recycled plastic or biodegradable materials, replacing ingredients or components with more environmentally friendly options.
• Procurement and suppliers: Evaluate your purchasing process for sustainability: recycling-friendly materials, processes and packaging. Ask for participation from employees and suppliers to incorporate sustainable practices.
• Product design: Design your products with sustainable goals in mind: reduce resource requirements, better manage all aspects of product application, dissemination and end-of-life from the time it gets to the hands of the customer to the time it ends up in the landfill. Do ‘what-if’ analysis to understand the environmental impact if demand increases. And, always simplifying your product to make it easy to be green.

As you build your sustainability strategy, you will identify new opportunities, risks and bottom line implications. Ultimately your success depends on your leadership, commitment, planning, creativity and innovations. Recognize this is a journey and track your progress using your benchmark: how well your company is performing against your sustainability requirements, and how your customers are reacting to it. Also create a sustainability knowledge center to track best practices, policies and learnings. Make your goals and progress public, and share it with your organization. This will ensure everyone is living up to the same standards. Employee engagement is crucial for any sustainability strategy.

Technorati Tags: sustainability, innovation management and sustainability, sustainability strategy

The destiny of the world is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories it loves and believes in. —Harold Goddard

Storytelling is an art. It is powerful, expressive, and perhaps the quickest path to building deep connections. When you are in the presence of a good storyteller, words take you beyond their meanings where you are presented to the world of possibilities. Its like living Sheherazade and hearing her stories from One Thousand and One Nights. I had the pleasure of working for a General Manager that had an amazing storytelling ability. Stories of our customers, competitors, market changes, hopes and dreams were his way of expressing his experiences, his vision and exploring how we could jointly create a new shared reality. For a startup within a large company, these stories are crucial for building a common future and a culture that would sustain itself when the going gets tough.

I can go on and on about the importance of storytelling for the innovation process and the leadership. However, Steve Denning summarizes the power of storytelling quite eloquently in his blog: The Secret Language of Leadership. You can read his summary here.

If you don’t know the trees you may be lost in the forest, but if you don’t know the stories you may be lost in life. —Siberian Elder

We are our stories. We tell ourselves stories about what we can and can’t do, how our world operates, and we use these stories to internalize what we experience daily through our clouded filters. If you like to know more about how our stories shapes our lives, take a look at Jim Loehr’s book The Power of Story: Rewrite Your Destiny in Business and in Life, and be ready to explore your own story.

I hope you can see the power of stories, their influence and impact in the innovation process as they shape and form our views of the world. I also hope that you recognize the importance of grounding ourselves when it comes to our stories, so that we are seeing them for what they really are. Before you read the rest of the post, take a moment and think about some of your own stories. Then, see if any of the ideas below can help ground them, so that they are more real.

Stories are a form of assumptions. However, before you take apart the whole plot piece by piece, step back and understand the overall theme, the key characters and the point of view needed for success. Evaluate each, and determine which ones need to be treated as assumptions and which ones are just flashbacks in your story that adds flavor and spice. Record each of these assumptions and start your validation and tracking process. Just as an example, an in depth understanding of your ecosystem is mandatory for a story that evolves around making your technology platform pervasive across the board. Some of those players within your ecosystem will be gatekeepers needing to be infiltrated, while others are accessory providers adding sugar and spice and something nice to your product. Make sure you are focusing on the right problems.

Get to know your storyteller. In the real world, our storytellers are a part of the human machinery that operates the thing called the corporate bureaucracy. The story might be great, and might even be true. But, if it doesn’t fit within the decision making structure of this bigger machine, it will never be a legend. So, get to know your storytellers, the structure and the decision making process they operate in. It will give you the opportunity to evolve your story, if it wasn’t quite right to begin with. Things such as, your firm’s hurdle rate, markets you operate in, revenue projections, type of customers you serve, resource and funding requirements will all play into your story somehow.

Everyone loves a good ending. So, understand your key metrics that you need to measure and track. Lets say that your story is referring to a target market size. Recognize that, it is actually talking about the addressable target market of your product, and put actions in place to grow that size overtime. Or, maybe your success truly depends on your customer connection. Then start building your customer relationship model and your brand where the customer is the keystone of your story from day one.

Every story has a point of view and a perspective that changes depending on the person involved. It is great to have different perspectives, angles and takeaways which will improve your creativity and innovativeness. However, you need common vocabulary, understanding and acknowledgement in order to execute “Ready all…Row” command properly. Take your customer knowledge as an example. Good analysis and understanding of your customer data is priceless. Yet, extracting this data unbiasedly, interpreting it appropriately and creating the right actions are your challenge. For more on this, check out How to Hear the Voice of Your Customers: Hone First-Person Intelligence From All Forms of Feedback by David Bean at MarketingProfs (registration might be required to access). So, use your stories well, and create the language and the vocabulary that your culture will understand and embrace.

Your stories have a structure (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution), and so should your innovation process. Milestones, stage-gate process, iterations, … are great way to ground yourself in the story while it evolves. Whatever process you use, make sure you have frequent checkpoints along the path to keep you honest and accountable.

Finally, share your stories with others and allow them to make it their own. Otherwise, when story is over everyone just goes home. Yes, a meaningful story can be inspiring. But for it to ignite the change you are hoping, individuals will need to believe in the story and make it their own for it to be real. In other words, when you pass the baton, someone is there to take and continue from where you left off, because they believe.

And remember: “The answer is always in the entire story, not a piece of it.” (Jim Harrison)

Technorati Tags: stories, storytelling, grounding yourself

It was the best of times… It was the worst of times… No worries, not when we have strategic agility.

Just as strategy’s roots come from the military with Sun Tzu, the foundations of strategic agility are thanks to Napoleon. By incorporating mobility and flexibility (corps d’armée system) combined with strong communication channels (communication backbone of marshals), Napoleon revolutionized the war strategies of his time. He recognized time as the key strategic element for his success, and gained a competitive advantage by identifying ways to dynamically organize and structure his attacks based on the latest information from the battlefront: a classic example of marrying strategic planning with strategic agility.

I don’t need to point out that our business environment has changed. For some, it might even feel a bit like a battlefront. Every day it is increasingly competitive, with an abundance of information available instantly to everyone, where constantly evolving technologies accelerate the commoditization cycle, not to mention we may be at the brink of an economic depression. With that, every strategic plan has the opportunity to become obsolete overnight, along with what was once your competitive advantage and differentiation. As they say, never a dull moment.

How well and how fast you predict, foresee, adjust, adapt and exploit opportunities in this ever changing environment defines your strategic agility quotient. With that, strategic agility is not just a nice to have. It should be embedded into your culture, your business processes and organization, and you should make it a key core competency and capability to enable continuous value creation for your company.

To foster strategic agility, you need to invest in many facets of your organization.

• Management by Objective (MBO): Originally rooted in HP’s management philosophy, MBOs are a great way to align your workforce to the ever-changing needs of your organization.
• Change management: Your efficiency and effectiveness at mastering change initiatives and handling uncertainty will improve your speed of execution and the flexibility of your organization.
• Communication backbone: Everyone in your organization needs to understand your business and the context for its success. Through this, they can understand the key triggers to watch, to act upon and more importantly their role for making it happen.
• Organizational learning: Your culture not only needs to embrace new and different, but also learn from past experiences.
• Organizational processes and structure: Without a well understood set of processes, new information and knowledge will be lost within the organization. Without an organizational structure that can effectively act on new information and knowledge (prioritization of projects, resources, …), one would be left wishing that the information was never observed.
• Organizational talent: With your HR team, you need to grow and recruit the needed talent and experience to execute for the future.
• Environmental scanning: Build in habits and provide tools for your organization to look for future trends. But don’t stop there; encourage communication and incorporation of your findings into future plans and activities.
• Ecosystem capabilities: You need to extend beyond your organization, to your ecosystem, and build capabilities and a communication backbone for faster response: customer relationship management, supply chain, distribution chain, manufacturing, IT, …
• Maintain a healthy balance: As with everything, you need to maintain a balanced view between adaptiveness, responsiveness, speed, cost, quality, functionality, brand and customer care.

Though strategic agility is a 2-word phrase, building the capability and skills to be strategically agile is more complex. Think of it as a pyramid of capabilities that build on each other, extending beyond your organization’s boundaries. You can utilize this framework to assess your strategic agility. Does your organization and your ecosystem have the intent, the focus towards scanning the horizon and beyond, and to what degree and depth? Do you have the right behaviors to support the intention: avoidance of analysis paralysis, creative analysis, systems thinking, the curiosity to explore and understand? Does your organization and ecosystem extend beyond now to understand new patterns formulating on the horizon, and work collectively to decode the hidden messages? Does your culture welcome new ideas and thoughts at every level? Do you have the processes and structures to make the necessary adjustments and strategic course corrections efficiently and effectively?

Strategic agility is not for everyone, at least not to the same degree. But, recognize that globalization and the speed of change is requiring every industry to embed some aspect of strategic agility into its core in order to survive, even if your sole differentiation is based on operational excellence. So, get to know thyself. Analyze your risk profile, communicate your key boundaries for decision making (hurdle rate, % of customers impacted, resources impacted, ..) and define your key change triggers that your organization must be aware of (new technology, new entrant, shifts in the economy, customer trends, …). Whatever your solution, make sure you are not the frog slowly being brought to a boil…

Technorati Tags: strategic agility, fostering strategic agility