Beyond Busy: A review of "Betterness" by Umair Haque

Looking for a short, compelling book to read now to get your thinking straightened out for the rest of the year? I'd like to recommend Umair Haque's Betterness: Economics for Humans. It's a pithy book, only about 60 pages long, and it's available as a PDF from Web site of the Harvard Business Review. It costs $2.99. Skip a latte and buy it.

If you're one of the 171,000 people following Umair Haque on Twitter (@umaihr), you know he's exasperated by the state of Western economies. Legions of people are unemployed or underemployed, work has become a grind, and corrupt organizations are working diligently to tailor laws and regulations to abet further corruption—the list goes on. Haque thinks we can do better. Betterness is a his critique of the status quo and a crie de coeur for doing work that is more satisfying and more beneficial for everyone.

Haque contends that a lot of our present trouble comes from focusing on the wrong thing:  a bottom line that measures the monetary accumulations of an organization, rather than the long-term health of the organization, its employees, its customers, its community, and the world at large. Haque would have us lift our eyes from our balance sheets and take a hard look at the world around us. We should recognize the rampant dissatisfaction, the talent being squandered, a natural world in decline, and plenty of unseized opportunities for individuals and organizations to make a difference. Metrics like GDP and stock dividends are too narrow to serve as guideposts for most meaningful work. We need broader indexes that accurately assess our general welfare. Haque proposes a new formula: "real human welfare equals natural capital, plus financial capital, plus intellectual capital, plus human capital, plus social, emotional, and organizational capital."

"Well," you might harumph, "this is all well and good, but a lot of this human and community welfare stuff (emotional capital?!) extends beyond the mission of our company. We're focused on shareholder value, after all, and we're legally bound to be so. We're not a 501(3)c). What you're asking for is even beyond the scope of traditional economics."

Perhaps that's a valid response, but Haque wants companies and the field of economics itself to broaden their scope. A hundred years ago, he points out, psychology confined itself to the curing of mental ailments. Now it's a holistic science that helps people live richer, more fulfilling lives. Haque wants economics to effect a similar transformation, becoming in the words of his subtitle, an "economics for humans."

Some organizations have already broadened their thinking beyond the balance sheet and are now generating what Haque calls "real wealth." He cites Apple, Google, Pepsi, lululemon athletica, Nike, Pixar, and Whole Foods as examples of companies that are working hard to achieve something greater than simply crushing competitors and reaping profits at any cost. Their idealism doesn't seem to be inhibiting their success. All these companies are financially healthy, Apple and Google extremely so. Of course, even these companies still wrestle with the demons of 20th century small-mindedness. Consider Steve Jobs' professed willingness to spend every last dime of Apple's cash reserves crushing Google for its supposedly perfidious development of Android. Even though the company spent around $100 million on this legal venture last year, at least for now the company's primary focus still seems to be building insanely great products. I don't know enough about Pepsi to understand why a soft drink manufacturer is sharing top-billing for virtue with a company like Whole Foods. But I agree with Haque that there are successful companies around that do distinguish themselves by thinking about the bigger picture.

Idealism can pay off. Customers are loyal to companies like Apple and Whole Foods in part because they feel that these companies share their values. People everywhere are looking for ways to make a difference, and they'll buy from companies that are trying to be virtuous. These companies are exemplars of capitalist organizations on the road to Haque's ideal of betterness.

How can other organizations follow suit? First, they need to re-orient themselves. Their biggest adversaries are themselves. Haque urges organizations to jettison their vainglorious, self-centered vision statements, mission statements, and strategic plans, and instead adopt an approach based on ambitions, intentions, constraints, and imperatives. Haque expounds on these terms, contrasting each one to its 20th century capitalist analog. Thus:

• "Ambition specifies higher-order returns concisely and precisely: which kinds of higher-order capital an organization will return and to whom it wishes to return them." Ambition is more than dominating a certain market or being thought of a certain way. Ambition serves consumers and communities, not just company share-holders. In that way it's broader and more inclusive than a traditional vision statement.
• "An intention expresses how, through the act of exchange, an organization will enhance the self-determination and sovereignty of its constituents by making them more capable of seeding, nurturing, and harvesting all the many kinds of wealth, not just sell them stuff that merely satisfies their short-term needs." With its more sweeping goals, intentions replace the traditional internally-focused mission statement.
• "Think of constraints as negative rights: rights that we, the organization, don’t have because they damage the potential of any or all of our constituents." Whole Foods carrying junk food, for example, or Apple selling products that they themselves consider mediocre, even if they would be highly profitable. For Haque, constraints are a virtuous replacement of 20th century corporate strategies.
• "Imperatives are timeless: they are actions we will always take." Imperatives are "daily commandments"—things people should do every day. For example, at Pixar employees work every day to create movies in which the story comes first.

I found Haque's mixture of idealism and pragmatism both refreshing and bracing. I appreciated his diligence and methodicalness in spelling out ways that organizations can shift their thinking from traditional values to broader concerns.

Betterness is available at the Harvard Business Review.

Using Social Media to Manage by Objectives

The New York Times recently ran an interview with Mark Pincus, the C.E.O of Zynga. It's an interesting interview. Pincus talks about the importance of employees feeling like they're in charge of something: everyone should be C.E.O. of something. He also talks about hiring people who are still hungry for success and managing people by asking them to articulate a few key objectives for the week.

Regarding his method of managing, Pincus says:

John Doerr [the venture capitalist] sold me on this idea of O.K.R.'s, which stands for objectives and key results. It was developed at Intel and used at Google, and the idea is that the whole company and every group has one objective and three measurable key results, and if you achieve two of the three, you achieve your overall objective, and if you achieve all three, you’ve really killed it.


We put the whole company on that, so everyone knows their O.K.R.'s. And that is a good, simple organizing principle that keeps people focused on the three things that matter — not the 10.


Then I ask everybody to write down on Sunday night or Monday morning what are your three priorities for the week, and then on Friday see how you did against them. It’s the only way people can stay focused and not burn out. And if I look at your road map and you have 10 priorities for you and your team, you probably don't know which of the three matter, and probably none of the 10 are right.


I can look at everyone's piece of paper, and their road map shows every item you were going to do and your predicted results and actual results, and then the results are in red if you missed them, yellow if they're close and green if you passed them. I think road maps are a great principle just for managing your life. It keeps everybody focused, and it lets me know what trains are on or off the tracks.

For me, the phrase that leapt off the page here was "piece of paper." Sure, one could track all these objectives on paper, but I think it makes more sense to post this information on blogs or wikis, where the objectives would be visible to all and where tagging could be used to tie individual objectives to larger departmental or organizational objectives. In other words, instead of using paper, use Jive or MindTouch or Thought Farmer. That makes the objectives amenable, too, to importing into BI tools or simple graphing tools sometimes included in these platforms. And if some objectives are sensitive or confidential, role-based access controls could be used to make them visible only to authorized managers.

There's been lots of talk about how social media platforms help workers share information and expertise. The oft-cited example is a worker discovering which colleagues in other departments have relevant expertise. Social media platforms help people discover and nurture such connections.

I hope that in the coming years, more organizations realize what powerful tools these platforms can be for strategic planning: for collecting information for use in strategic plans and for disseminating and tracking strategic objectives. Let's use these platforms for sharing information up and down the organization, as well as across, and for making strategic objectives visible and understandable to all.

Business Strategy and PR

If you work for a PR agency or hire PR agencies, ZDNet blogger Jennifer Leggio's recent report on PR firms and social media is a must-read. The report summarizes the results of a survey that Jennifer conducted between November and January. Six hundred forty-two people responded to the survey. "The primary targeted respondents were PR decision-makers at companies with 1,000 or more employees, with small business / start-up owners as secondary targeted respondents."

The heart of the survey examines how well PR firms understand and take advantage of social media. It's relevatory data, but I'd like to call attention to another question the survey touched on: how well PR activity aligns with a company's business strategy.

I've written elsewhere how important it is for a company to create an annual strategic plan, complete with measurable objectives. Once adopted, this plan should direct all major activity in every division and department.

So I was intrigued to see the survey responses to the following statement: "Agency understands how PR needs to fuel entire business strategy, not just news coverage."

Less than a quarter of respondents agreed with this statement (22%), and only 12% strongly agreed with it. Another quarter were on the fence. And fully half of respondents reported that their PR agency did not understand how PR could support the company's business strategy beyond merely getting news coverage.

This breakdown in strategic understanding and execution could explain why, elsewhere in the survey, only 44% of respondents reported that their overall experience with their PR agency had been "good."

What's preventing PR firms from understanding how to support business strategy? I expect the answer is different at different agencies and different clients. But here are some likely explanations:

• The PR form is working by rote. Take product news, take messaging guidelines, craft press release, pitch, brief, distribute. Repeat. Critical analysis and planning isn't part of the process.
  
• The PR team doesn't have a solid understanding of business strategies beyond the strategy of getting coverage.
  
• The client has not adequately explained its strategy to the agency. If the strategy is conveyed at all, it's conveyed by:
  
  
  
  • A VP or CXO stepping into a conference room for 15 minutes to brief the PR team and a couple of marketing people on the company's direction for the year.
    
  • A slide deck that covers high-level trends and initiatives that is emailed over to the PR team.
    
  • A couple of sentences in a messaging document.
    
  
  

In other words, the problem likely lies sometimes in the capacity of PR agencies. Other times, it likely lies in the poor job the client is doing explaining its strategy in the first place. And other times, it's probably a combination of both.

Ideally, a company should be able to presents its strategy in a 5-20-page document that summarizes 5-10 key objectives for the company and supports them with measurable milestones. The document may include a few pages of background material upfront. The objectives should be bold (perhaps BHAGs, as described by Porras and Collins).

A company should be able to present this strategic plan to its PR agency, as well as to every internal employee. It should review its progress against the plan at least quarterly. Of course, it should also review the PR agency's activities against this plan.

There's nothing wrong with a VP or CXO stepping into the room to explain the big picture to the team. And there's nothing wrong with sending lots of background material in the way of slides and white papers to educate the agency. But the more clearly a company enunciates its strategy (through a formal strategic plan), the more likely everyone involved in the company—from internal teams to external agencies—will able to act effectively to achieve important strategic goals.

Pop quiz: If you had detail your company's business strategy to a new PR agency or a new internal hire 15 minutes from now, would you be able to do it?


Big arrow photo copyright, some rights reserved, Mikl Roventine.

Twilight for Ad-based and Freemium-Model Start-ups

A recent article in the New York Times breaks the news that "Angels Flee From Tech Start-ups": angel investors (wealthy individual investors) have lost money in the stock downturn and are no longer as willing to fund early stage companies. Angel investors typically make investments ranging from $10,000 to $1 million to help companies when they are just beginning. Once a company, applying its angel funding, has built a functioning prototype and perhaps even won a few customers, it can proceed to ask for more substantial funding—perhaps $1-5 million—from venture capitalists (VCs).

But, of course, getting VC funding is getting a lot harder, too. Ask anyone in a start-up these days, and they'll tell you that the spigot of VC funding has been turned almost entirely off. VCs like Sequoia Capital recognize that difficult times call for tight fiscal management (see Sequoia's famous Presentation of Doom to get a sense of the VC community's apprehension about the economy).

Even aside from the plummeting economy of the past few months, the angel/VC model for starting a company has been becoming increasingly problematic. Angels and VCs put money into a company, of course, hoping to get a substantial return, often 10x or more, on their investment. But as Om Malik pointed out in his recent post, "IPO Drought Hides Bigger Tech Woes," only a handful of companies from any industry have gone public over the past few years. He writes:

Look at some of the numbers: in 2008 there were nine IPOs in the technology, telecom and media (TMT) sector vs. 77 in 2007. In 2008, there were only six VC-backed IPOS and only one from Silicon Valley.

Without a viable IPO market, the only way a start-up can deliver a big return to investors is by being acquired. But if acquirers know the start-up has no alternative but to be acquired, they can stall negotiations and work out a low price. And large companies, of course, can only acquire so many small companies. Many small, worthy companies will likely go begging for suitors. Which is another way of saying that many VC investments, however well managed, will not deliver their expected returns.

The classic Silicon Valley model of investing in a company, growing it over some number of unprofitable years, and then exiting through an IPO or M&A activity is looking increasingly sketchy.

Here, then, is the lunar landscape start-ups find themselves inhabiting:

• A moribund IPO market
  
• Declining consumer spending
  
• Business spending curtailed
  
• Inventories growing
  
• Non-essential purchases by consumers and businesses deferred indefinitely
  

No wonder VCs are holding onto their cash. Pouring $5-20 million into a company that remains unprofitable for years just doesn't make a lot of sense in this environment.

Web 2.0 Business Models

The lack of angel and VC funding for has several implications for the types of business a software start-up can pursue. Or perhaps, without wanting to sound too catty, I should say that the lack of angel and VC may force a growing number of start-ups to behave like traditional businesses.

Far too many start-ups these days build technology (typically a Web site) and assume that they'll find the business model later, maybe much later, years later, if ever. I'm not opposed to this approach outright. Twitter came about this way because a company was willing to invest in a technology without a clear business case, and I think the communication on Twitter can be powerful and useful. But I think the high tech industry loses something—more than a lot of money, I mean—when the normal model for launching a business is, "We'll figure that out later, and besides, we can start selling ads next quarter." The industry's business acumen is becoming dull or at least severely constrained.

A friend recently directed my attention to a blog post, "Web 2.0, Revenue Models and Profitability: A Web 1.0 Comparison," which summarily points out that the Web 2.0 Emperor of Revenue is looking a tad bare:

"As we recently learned that Digg was still losing money on revenue numbers that look quite paltry, it occurred to me that Digg and some of Web 2.0's other hot young startups really aren't hot young startups anymore.


Facebook was launched in February 2004. Digg was launched in November 2004. Twitter was launched in July 2006. Facebook is almost five years old, Digg is just over four years old and Twitter is two and a half years old.


They all share a common trait: none has developed into a self-sustaining business whose financial future seems assured.


One of Web 2.0's biggest myths: it's far easier and far cheaper to get a startup off the ground today than it was a decade ago.


Citing the wide range of mature, open-source technologies and the abundance of talent available today, Web 2.0 proponents have told us that taking an idea from concept to reality, getting it launched and growing it can be a cheap affair.


If that's the case, one would logically assume that today's Web 2.0 startups would have developed into lean, mean revenue-generating machines. Instead, we see the exact opposite."

The ad revenue many of these companies generates almost seems like an afterthought to me, as though the management team was saying, "Well, we've got all these users on our site. We might has well make a little money off them by advertising." Revenue isn't built into the business; it's tacked on, literally as far as HTML goes, in the form of banner ads and text ads. These companies have a technology model, they also probably have service and community models, but they don't really have a business model, per se. The business aspect of their businesses is decidedly an ancillary concern.

Risks for Freemium Businesses

A popular business model among Web 2.0 companies is the so-called freemium model, based on a coinage by Jarid Lukin of Alacra. As Amy Shuen explains in her book, Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide, the term "freemium" was first introduced by venture capitalist Fred Wilson on his blog, A VC, where he described the model this way:

Give your service away for free, possible ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc., then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.

The word "freemium" is a portmanteau word combining free + premium. Offer a free service, then charge for Pro services you develop over time.

From a business point of view, the freemium model has clear advantages over simple ad-based models, in that Pro features can deliver real value that customers will pay for, regardless of whatever's happening in the pricing and ROI of online ads.

But the freemium model poses its own risks, which are exacerbated by the tight money market and the widespread disappearance of discretionary spending:

• It can take quite a while to develop services to the point where add-on Pro features are worth paying for. If it takes a start-up 12 months to develop its community, 6 months for its Pro features to mature and begin gaining traction, and another 6 months for the Pro features to catch on with users (in an economy where much non-critical spending is being cut), does the start-up have enough money in the bank to survive? Have its investors run out of patience?
  
• While the company is growing its community to attract enough purchasers of Pro services, its data center needs and operating costs continue to grow. If not managed shrewdly, these mounting costs, along with increased tech support costs for Pro services, may erase any financial gains realized by revenue from Pro services.
  
• The company has to find the right dividing line between free and Pro. Give too much away, and the company won't make enough money from the Pro. Give too little away, and the company won't attract a sufficient number of free users to sustain the community and its services in the first place.
  

I think there's lots to admire about freemium sites like Flickr, but less mature, freemium-based start-ups may find themselves racing against an unforgiving clock.

What Start-ups Founded in 2009 Will Likely Look Like

Without the luxury of $5 million in the bank (or even $1 million in the bank, courtesy of angels) to grow a user base that doesn't cover its own costs, new start-ups will have to focus intensely on revenue generation and profitability from the get-go.

This is not a bad thing. It is, oddly enough, an unfamiliar thing to many people founding start-ups. The requirement for short-term revenue might even strike some founders as mind-bloggling, unfair, and needlessly constraining.

To me, such a reaction signals how dependent the high tech industry has become on VC funding—on having a sinecure, more or less, for creating and selling advanced technical solutions. I'm not against VC funding by any means, but I think it's troubling that so many people in technology have difficulty even considering building a company that, like most companies in most other industries, actually makes money sooner than later. And I think, as the Centernetworks author noted above, it gives lie to the Web 2.0 idea that it's faster and easier to build a business thanks to LAMP stacks, affordable hardware, etc. People using those technologies aren't building profitable businesses. They're delivering services to growing communities, and often as not losing money hand over fist.

Striving for short-term revenue (perhaps, 6-12 months, based on the credit limits of the founders credit cards and the balance in their savings accounts) and possibly even short-term profitability (12-24 months!) will require significant changes in the thoughts and actions of founders.

But the high tech industry has worked through transformations of similar difficulty over the past decade or so. Remember when you could take 18-24 months to develop your first product? Now it's weeks or a few months, at most. Remember rigid waterfall development cycles? Now agile development is becoming the norm. Remember lavish tradeshow booths and offset-printed brochures? Now you if you market through tradeshows at all, you're likely using a popup booth and telling people to download the PDF. Or you're reaching customers through Web seminars, forums, Twitter, and Skype. I expect that, having endured the brutal realities of 2009, a growing number technologist will come to embrace the new, old way of thinking about business and revenue.

Focusing on proximate or even immediate revenue generation has several implications for a company's business model and its founding team.

1. The company may need to begin with consultative selling, so the founding team may need to include one or more people who can sell services and manage client interactions. Instead of waiting 6-12 months to hire a salesperson, the company might include one in the founding team.
   
2. Companies will not have the luxury for long iterative development cycles; they'll still likely use agile development and iterate, but it now makes more economic sense than ever to invest in customer experience analysis, really analyzing what customers need and want, rather than trusting the founders' hunches and correcting misperceptions over a matter of 6-9 months.
   
3. Faced with curtailed spending by businesses and a wealth of sophisticated technology offerings from both large and small technology vendors, a start-up's best bet may be to focus on narrow problems specific to a particular industry. might be a good idea to tackle a difficult problem that requires domain expertise and tenacity—more expertise and tenacity than large vendors have been willing to contribute. Implication: the founding team will likely then include one or more members with deep expertise in a vertical market.
   
4. If start-ups have adequate resources, they should consider a blue ocean strategy, creating a new uncontested market that solves problems not addressed by other products and services currently available.
   

These implications and market pressures apply to start-ups that don't have the luxury of having millions of dollars in the bank. They obviously don't apply to existing companies that are already well funded. And I'm far from expecting or hoping for the demise of any big-name Web 2.0 companies like Digg or Twitter. In fact, I expect Digg and Twitter and other big-name Web 2.0 properties to survive, in part because they're important enough in the technology ecosystem, which includes the business managers who effect M&A transactions, to last until they find some sort of shelter. (I'm titled this blog post "twilight," not blackest midnight and not noon. Some entities will linger for a long time. But things that were possible earlier, will likely not be possible again soon.)

But for every Digg or Twitter, there are probably dozens of smaller, less well-known Web 2.0 companies that will find it increasingly difficult to survive. I wish them well. At the same time, I hope that most of the teams founding start-ups this year will not follow their example. Instead, I would encourage founders of new start-ups to think more like traditional business people.

If you're not taking in VC funding (because you can't get any), you don't have the pressure of delivering a 10x return in a few years. Instead, you face the different, but still daunting challenge of growing a profitable business. That's hard to do in any market, but it's a worthy undertaking, no less noble, and no less difficult.

Founders, listen: Business is hard. You're smart and motivated. Get on with it.

Green IT: Now More than Ever

"Each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet. . . . We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its costs. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. . . . All this we can do. All this we will do."

— President Barack Obama, Inauguration Speech

In yesterday's historic inaugural speech, President Obama set a new direction for America, or perhaps I should say he returned America to its true direction—a course where progress is achieved through responsibility, trust, compassion, creativity, and hard work.

Like many people, I was pleased to hear Obama's pledge to restore science to its rightful place. For the past eight years, the federal government has rejected science and its demonstrable truths for ideological talking points and purblind dreams of grandeur. One of the areas where the administration's suppression of science has been most publicized and most perilous is global warming. The administration has stalled on policy and questioned what no longer bears questioning.

If you would like a vivid reminder of just how compelling the evidence is, how fraught the dangers to human society and natural habits, and how galling governmental inaction has been, I strongly recommend a short, highly readable book written a few years ago by New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert: Field Notes from a Catastrophe.

The title might strike you as alarmist, but by the time you're done reading this book, I suspect you'll be alarmed—and frustrated, too, by our country's inaction.

As the phrase "field notes" suggests, Kolbert reports on research being conducted in the field: in Alaska, Greenland, England, the Middle East, and elsewhere. And the findings of this research are damning:

• The earth is now warmer than it has been for hundreds of thousands of years.
  
• Since 1979, the perennial sea ice in the Arctic has shrunk by roughly 250 million acres, an area roughly "the size of New York, Georgia, and Texas combined." The loss of this ice reduces the earth's ability to reflect sunlight; instead of reflecting light, the exposed seas absorb sunlight's energy, further heating the planet and melting more ice.
  
• After studying satellite data, James Hansen, a NASA official, has warned that if greenhouse gases aren't controlled, the Greenland ice sheet could melt, potentially, in time, raising sea levels 23 feet.
  
• Nineteen biologists from around the world studied the effect of global warming on eleven hundred species of plants and animals. If the species proved to be mobile, 15 percent of them would be "committed to extinction." If the species were stationary, the extinction rate rose to 37 percent.
  
• Heavy rainfall is expected to intensify in some of the most densely populated areas on the planet, such as the Mississippi Delta and the Thames basin. By 2080, England will likely be experiencing so-called century floods every few years.
  

The data goes on and on. The consensus among the scientific community is, for all intents and purposes, universal. The earth is heating up, the heating process has acquired a momentum of its own and will continue for decades, even if we were to curtail the emission of greenhouse gases immediately. But we're not curtailing them, and the Bush Administration had no interest in doing so.

I recently read the Harmon translation of Kafka's The Castle, and the evasiveness and circularity of Bush administration officials in their interview with Kolbert reminded me of scenes out of Kafka, minus the droll humor.

"[Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs] Dobriansky began by assuring me that despite how it might appear, the Bush administration took the issue of climate change 'very seriously.' . . . At one point, I asked the undersecretary if there were any circumstances under which the administration would accede to mandatory caps on emissions. 'Our approach has been predicated on: we act, we learn, we act again,' she said. In response to a question about how urgent the problem of stabilizing emission was, she replied, 'We act, we learn, we act again,' and in response to a question about what would constitute a 'dangerous' level of CO₂ in the atmosphere, she said, 'Forgive me, I'm going to repeat myself: we act, we learn, we act again.'"

I take it back: I've been unfair to Kafka's characters. Their evasions are far richer and more subtle than anything offered by Dobriansky and other Bush-era flacks.

But here's the thing: what are you doing about global warming in your business? Don't fall into the trap of "I read, I groan, I read again." Take action. Make green IT and green practices part of your strategic plan this year.

And if you need motivation—if you want a good jolt of pursued-by-a-grizzly-bear variety adrenalin for your and your staff—buy and read Kolbert's excellent book. It's available from Amazon, Powell's, and probably your local independent bookseller, as well.

Questions Worth Asking at the Beginning of the Year

Strategic Planning

1. Has my company identified 6-10 major objectives for the year and identified 3-6 supporting milestones for each objective? (For more about this, click here.)
   
2. Has this list of objectives and milestones been broadly communicated throughout the company?
3. Are directors and managers using this information to drive their departmental planning and budgets?

Product and Services Development

1. Has my company identified the user experiences that our products and services should provide?
2. Have these experiences formed the basis for development of products, including the identification of features and benefits?
3. Does my company have a process in place for assessing customer experiences and ensuring they meet our goals?

Strategic Communications and Customer Management

1. Does my company have up-to-date messaging guidelines available for all relevant parties, including not only executives, marketers, and sales people, but also all the other employees who might be interacting with customers and the public through forums and other social media?
2. Does my company have a systematic approach for monitoring social media interactions and responding promptly to situations that arise in these ad hoc communications channels?
3. Does my company have IT systems in place to integrate outbound communications with CRM and other internal IT systems?

Getting Strategic

Whether you're embarking on your normal planning for the next calendar year, or participating in emergency planning sessions in response to the economic slow-down, it's worth remembering the core attributes and benefits of a strategic plan.

Here's a summary from an earlier post.

Keeping a Small Business Focused and on Track

In the CrowdVine discussion thread for the upcoming Web 2.0 Expo, Tony Stubblebine of Crowdvine asked people what tricks they use to keep their business on track.

Here's my answer, drawing on my experience with a number of organizations:

To keep a business on track, I use:

1) A strategic plan that lays out major goals (e.g., win at least 3 reference customers in key market X), each of which can be tracked by objectively measured milestones or supporting goals. Almost everyone thinks of a revenue target as an obvious strategic goal—and it can be—but it's just as important to think about other goals that address the company's position in the market and the company's various capacities (engineering capacity, sales capacity, etc.). In some cases, it might be better to settle for a lower revenue target while managing the company in such a way to address a latent deficiency. For example, it might be better for a cash-strapped company to manage its activities and sales expenses to end the year with more cash (but lower top-line revenue), instead of blowing out a revenue number with expensive sales campaigns and ending up with nothing in bank (again) and no ability to, say, hire critical engineers for the product overhaul planned for next year.

The main thing is to ask: Where do you want to be by the end of the year? What do you want to have in motion? Capture those ideas in specific goals and objectives.

All the company's major activities should be subsumed in the strategic plan. If you're working on something, you should be able to identify which one of the 5-10 major goals for the company it relates to. (And if you find that you've identified more than 10 goals, pare them down, especially if this is your first time trying to manage operations for an entire fiscal year according to a strategic plan.) Every organization, even small consultancies and non-profits, should develop and manage to such a plan. At the end of the year, you should be able to look back and judge how well you've done. If you've developed a good plan, you're going to find that you've not only hit your revenue goals, but that you've built a stronger organization that's better positioned for success.

2) A company mission statement or a summary of core values (see Collins and Porras' "Built to Last"). For example, I consider being responsive to customers to be one of the highest values for my work. One of the ways I keep my business on track is by asking myself several times each day, "Am I being responsive to my customers? Is there someone I should be calling?" If there's a value or behavior that's key to your company, note it. Write it down. Live by it.

I also:

3) Align technology to support #1 and #2. Take advantage of what's new (e.g., some of the great stuff that's going to be shown off at the Web 2.0 show), but don't get distracted. Use everything you can find—from software to devices to the right office chairs—that eliminates distractions, promotes productivity, and helps your employees meet your organization's goals while working in accordance with core values.

4) Hire people who are genuinely interested in growing a great business. (Suggestion for hiring managers: mention that you have a strategic plan, and see how the candidate reacts. Does he or she ask to see it, or does he or she simply nod and move on?)