Friday, November 8, 2013

The Impermanence of Corporate Culture

About seven years ago, a friend of mine – I’ll call him “Bob” – joined a Silicon Valley start-up, which I will call “Dot.Com.” He was among the first employees and knew he was taking a huge career risk. But he was footloose and fancy-free at the time, young, newly divorced and feeling the urge to start fresh in a new city, with new challenges.
       Seven years later, he’s one of the veterans. In the office, he often wears a San Francisco Giants jersey with the number “11” because he’s Employee #11 – that is, the eleventh person to join the company that now numbers nearly a thousand employees in locations from the Bay Area, to Austin, New York, Boston, London, and Singapore.
       His company is about to go public and he stands to reap an immense financial windfall from his tens of thousands of stock options. Yet, he’s eager to leave.
       Asked why, Bob replied that the company isn’t the same as it was in its founding days. He explained that the sense of camaraderie that infused and inspired the core team as it worked long hours and struggled to launch its web-based services model has evaporated. In its place are policies, procedures, politics, and hassles – and not a lot of fun, he adds.
       We pressed the question, wondering whether the culture of the organization had changed. He looked puzzled. “Culture?” he asked. “Look. All I know is that we worked hard, we worked long hours, and we played hard. We had a strong sense of mission that we would conquer the world. We went about it in a single-minded way, as a team.”

Riding the roller coaster

That Bob is now leaving is not an uncommon phenomenon in that world. Previously successful start-ups like Apple, Microsoft, Google and countless others have experienced mass migrations around the time of their IPOs. Newly and comfortably wealthy, a lot of their leading talent felt free to cut the strings, desirous of riding that roller coaster again. So there’s that aspect, too – that desire to experience the thrill of creation once again. 
       But the transience that is a corporate culture intrigues and invites further exploration. How does a company culture form? What sustains it? Is culture permanent? Does a company culture evolve with time? How? Why?
       The short answer is, a culture is no more static and definable than is the business organization in which it lives. We know from experience and observation that static businesses ultimately cease being. In that change and challenges will always assault organizations, remaining an unchanged operation is a recipe for eventual failure. So the culture of the organization evolves with the changes and challenges that the business confronts and surmounts.
       Not to put too much of an egghead spin on it, but it helps to read what an academic has to say on the subject. According to MIT’s Edgar Schein, one of foremost scholars on culture, organizational culture is “a pattern of basic assumptions – invented, discovered or developed by a given group as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration – that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.”
       Phew!

It’s a Darwinian thing

Okay, that’s a long-winded (but accurate) way to describe the internal dynamic of a team as its members confront the issues and tests that comprise the foundation of an enterprise’s creation. As Schein goes on to point out, the culture of an organization evolves – in fact, it must evolve – to adapt to the evolution of the world in which it operates. Again, as noted here (and more famously by Charles Darwin), a failure to adapt is to accept expiration.
       So if we think about the many external inputs that impose change on organizations, it’s obvious why a culture evolves. As Bob’s company grew, its opportunities expanded. The size, sophistication and demands of its growing customer base grew too. What satisfied Dot.Com’s early customers – many of which were also small companies – wouldn’t work for the far more demanding and exacting Fortune 500 companies it was now servicing.
       Bob’s company hired additional staff to help tackle and solve the fresh unknowns, problems and challenges its newer customers brought it. And with each new staff member came a new way of approaching such challenges. Those new approaches may or may not have meshed with the culture of the previously small company.
       With each new challenge, with each new staffer, the culture changed just a little. Amassed over the seven years of an improving balance sheet, with dozens and then hundreds of new employees being added, the culture known by Bob and his teammates from the early days had evaporated.
       Is that a good thing? Well, if Dot.Com is a thriving business, solving heretofore-unsolvable problems for other businesses, then yes, it’s a good thing. But if you’re Bob, longing for the fun days of being in a startup, it probably isn’t. No wonder it’s time for Bob to move on.
       Change is a good thing because with it comes growth, success and profitability. And an evolving culture.

Friday, October 11, 2013

Living on Technology’s Leading Edge

In the last decade of the 19th century and early years of the 20th century, the biggest problem confronting the people of New York City was the massive amounts of horse manure in the streets. In addition to its offensive odor and having to step carefully when crossing a street, there was a constant health hazard, especially in the hot summer months.  
      The city’s leaders wrestled with means to control it. Increasing the numbers of cleaning crews was insufficient. Among the proposals considered was putting limits on the number of horses allowed in the city. But that wasn’t practical. America’s most populous city, like all others, relied on horses to pull the carriages that conveyed passengers, and the wagons that delivered essential goods.  
      About the time the city fathers were at wit’s end, their problem was solved in a totally unexpected way: The arrival of the internal combustion engine and mass-produced automobiles. Within a decade or so, nearly all horses – and horse manure – disappeared from the streets of New York, replaced by horseless carriages. Problem solved. 

Ethernet goes *poof* 
In a similar vein, beginning in the early to mid-1990s, owners of office buildings scrambled to retrofit their structures with miles and miles of Ethernet cable to accommodate the need to connect all desktop computers to the Internet and local area networks. Yet, despite the massive investments in money and man-hours, within a decade, the need for Ethernet was virtually eliminated with the advent and widespread adoption of WiFi.
      Both these circumstances point up a core irony of technology: While we all welcome the capabilities and conveniences that technology gives us, at the same time it is not something that we can foresee and easily anticipate. Rather, it is something for which it is nearly impossible to plan.
      Consequently, no matter how prescient we may think we are as a society, we cannot foresee the effects that an unimagined technology would have on our lives and infrastructure after the fact.
      This challenge occurred to me while taking a tour of my town’s 45-year-old high school, which is in bad need of replacement. Over the years, the school administration had cobbled together various upgrades to sustain a campus that would provide the most current learning environment. But eventually, they just ran out of options.
      Take yourself back to the late 1960s and try to imagine what a high school building would require in terms of infrastructure 50 years hence. For one, they needed a library with enough shelf space to accommodate thousands and thousands of books.
      So here we are in 2013 and it’s time to replace that dinosaur – a dinosaur whose the library has been renamed the “Media Center,” with a fraction of the numbers of books envisioned 45 years ago. In their places are computer workstations, which no one could have imagined 50 years ago.  

Secretarial pool 
This dinosaur also has miles of unused Ethernet cable that had been strung above classroom ceiling panels some 20 years ago, and a computer center located in the same classroom where many high school girls 40 years ago learned to type in anticipation of joining the secretarial pool after graduation.
      And that’s to say nothing of the changes and accompanying expenses that new regulations and laws would impose on public buildings – including schools – the most prominent of which was the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. In addition, the advances in energy efficient construction alone make replacement imperative, if for no other reason than to save gobs of money in fuel and electricity costs.
      How do we account for changes that we cannot comprehend needing 40 and 50 years hence? If we couldn’t anticipate WiFi less than 10 years before it became widespread, how are we going to anticipate the next unknown technological leap and accommodate it accordingly? Thinking about business, how can we anticipate and incorporate the necessary changes that we cannot know?
      The short answer is, we can’t. But, we must approach unknown change with an open, inquiring mind, recognizing that today’s decisions work best in today’s world. In thinking through those decisions, in weighing the pros and cons of one choice versus another, are we adequately considering unknowns?
      Those “what if’s” can come back to haunt us. Those decisions that involve multimillion dollar capital investments must be made in the context of a discrete time frame, fully cognizant that even that time frame could shift quickly if something as momentous as the invention of the mass assembled automobile comes along to wipe the slate clean.
      Our planning window of opportunity, by the way, shrinks as fast as technology advances. A 10-year planning time frame is a vanishing luxury – if it exists at all.
      At its core, that’s what change is all about. That’s what we need to manage for, no matter the nature of our business. It means we must be nimble, always open to new ideas and new ways of thinking about challenges and potential solutions and opportunities.

Friday, September 27, 2013

What are you doing today to reinvent your business for tomorrow?

The day Apple introduced the iPod was the day it ceased being just a computer company – not that many people realized that at the time. In fact, Steve Jobs may have been the only one who did. But over the next few years, as succeeding and improved iterations of the pocket music player came out, the idea gradually sunk in that Apple had expanded beyond the realm of the Macintosh.
      The notion became permanently etched into the public’s consciousness with the subsequent introductions of the iPhone and iPad. Sure, Apple continued to produce evermore powerful, functional, and sophisticated computers and laptops. But Apple had morphed into a lifestyle company: a purveyor of tools and technologies that make our lives more pleasant, to some degree easier and, in many ways, more portable.
      What Apple and Steve Jobs figured out was how those tools and technologies perfectly linked to one another to create a unified whole that redefined for the world what Apple was and what it was capable of doing and giving us.
      In a similar vein, it’s unlikely that anyone who draws a paycheck from Nike thinks of the company as a shoemaker. When Bill Bowerman, the exceptional University of Oregon track coach, borrowed his wife’s waffle iron in the 1960s to make the sole for his ideal running shoe, he invented Nike. Little about the company today would be familiar to him.
      Today, the company’s Nike+ system allows runners to monitor and track each workout by means of sensors in their shoes to download data through Bluetooth into devices like iPhones. Via a Nike Internet platform, runners can share performance data online and receive customized advice from Nike coaches. Now that’s something Coach Bowerman would have loved.
      But that’s only one small part of what Nike does and is capable of today. 

Amazon and Google 
Amazon is not just an online bookseller. In addition to selling just about any and all consumer products, Amazon is now in direct competition to Netflix, streaming its own movie and TV series catalogues. 
       Rumor has it that Amazon wants to get into the cellphone business, too – with free cellphones, no less. Jeff Bezos just bought the Washington Post. Any guesses as to what that might mean for Amazon (and the Post)?
      Google is not just a search engine but, well, Google is now into nearly everything: from tablets, smartphones and the Android operating system that runs them, to office productivity software, and advertising, with a self-driving car in the wings.
      What these organizations have in common is that they didn’t stand still within the narrow confines of how the world perceived and defined them. Instead, they grasped the essence of their craft and passions, and understood where they excelled. They asked themselves what that implied, where it might take them, and what was possible. And they haven’t stopped asking those questions yet.
      Companies too numerous to name hewed to the tight concept of themselves, and continued to practice their trade efficiently and repeatedly. As a result, many of them either no longer exist or are a mere shadow of their former selves.
      While being in business in a capitalist system means you must grow, growth for its own sake is ultimately fruitless. What gets people out of bed in the morning and commuting to jobs at places like Apple and Nike is the thrill of constantly reinventing their businesses, of expanding the realm of the possible.
      The growth, success and profitability that those companies subsequently realize are the outcomes of that effort, not the reasons for the pursuit. When business leaders confuse the two, the end is in sight.
      What are you doing today to reinvent your business for tomorrow?


Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Are Middle Managers “The Glue that Binds Apathy to Vague Objectives?”

Last month, the Wall Street Journal ran a series about today’s mid-level managers. Full of anecdotes, quotes, and first-hand experiences, the series left this reader with the distinct impression that it’s gotten to be a pretty tough assignment.
      Pushed and pulled in multiple directions, often chasing “stretch” goals under tight deadlines, middle managers must keep their bosses happy and subordinates engaged, while ensuring that their business units are contributing effectively toward the company’s success, growth and profitability.
      The position of middle manager has evolved in parallel with the quickening pace and evolution of business today. Companies must be more responsive to the marketplace and their customers, while sustaining upward revenue and profit curves to satisfy shareholders. These burdens of responsibility fall disproportionately on the shoulders of middle managers, charged with implementing the strategies.
      Yet, making matters still more difficult, many organizations lack clear-cut objectives – or else the objectives change in a seemingly whimsical manner. In that environment, the approaches that worked last year for a middle manager are irrelevant or ineffective today.

Dilbert Nails It 
Around the same time as the Journal series, Scott Adams, cartoonist and author of the popular Dilbert comic, produced a strip one day that succinctly and hilariously summed his view of the current state of affairs for middle managers. The middle manager in this case is the one known as the “Pointy-Haired Boss”:
© 2013, Scott Adams, Inc.


Adams’ assessment may be a cynical view of management at the middle level, but the fact that it makes us laugh reveals its nugget of truth.  
      Yes, too often, the CEO’s strategy is vague. And, yes, many people within organizations are not singularly focused on the latest strategic edict from on high. But in many cases, it’s understandable.
      Today, many organizations struggle to build credibility and understanding among the employee audience. Often, we’ve heard employees respond to the latest strategy with an attitude that says, “this too shall pass.” They’ve seen strategic initiatives in the past and all have eventually gone away without effect. So why buy in this time?
      The problem with many such strategies is that they often are shaped in a vacuum, apart from the reality of needing to engage managers and employees in their development and implementation. In the end, middle managers are left to digest strategy documents and struggle to make them relevant to their teams. Senior management in such cases assumes that the organization is following along, when in fact the people are at sea, left to guess their respective roles in effecting the new approach.
      This all points up the changing roles and responsibilities in organizations today that must be acknowledged and acted on:
  • Senior leaders, striving to improve return on investment while assuring that the company has a strong future, must seek to identify and enact the most effective strategy to drive the company in the right direction with a minimum of turmoil or additional cost. Assuring that middle managers and employees are involved in the strategy’s development and throughout its implementation goes far in achieving its ultimate success.
  • Communicators assist leadership by helping to shape the strategy to assure its alignment with external and internal realities, and then by crafting the appropriate messages to convey the strategy into the organization in a meaningful and relevant way, via right channels, providing the right context in which to disseminate those messages, at the right cadence.
  • Middle managers and supervisors are the people with the most internal credibility among employees and therefore are best positioned to interpret the new strategies to add relevance at front end of the business – i.e., among the people tasked with producing, marketing, selling, distributing, servicing and supporting the goods and services on which the company and its future success are built. The role of middle managers is no longer that of the command-and-control gatekeeper as in the past, but rather the translators of the challenges and opportunities facing the organization, and the strategies that will guide the organization forward to address them effectively. In other words, their translation of the strategy must make it pertinent and actionable at the unit level.

Ideally, a successful future begins with a well-formed strategy, created when the leadership engages the organization and its capabilities, communicated via the middle managers who are provided the content, tools and training necessary to engage the people in the future of the organization to understand and proactively perform their respective roles in driving it forward.

Friday, August 23, 2013

When I take my sabbatical

My company has a wonderfully generous and creative policy. After five years of service, we are entitled to five weeks of sabbatical - free time to do whatever we want and get paid for it. 
     A side benefit to the company, in addition to having refreshed employees, is that many of my colleagues come back from their sabbaticals and write blogs about the experience, which are often thoughtful and full of special insights into life and work. 
     I still have four years before I can take mine. And I know that I will likely blog about it afterwards. Today, I was listening to Greg Brown and one of my favorites among his old songs came up on the random play function of my iPhone. 
     It's not so much a song as it is a narrative backed by a quiet guitar and occasional harmonica riffs. But it's the lyrics that I think speak so eloquently and cleverly of what's really important about life, and gives a hint of how I might like to spend my sabbatical in 2017. 

I think I'll drive out to Eugene, get a slide-in camper for my truck, pack a bamboo rod, hip boots, a book of flies from a Missoula pawn shop, rub mink oil into the cracked leather, wonder about the old guy who tied these trout chew flies. They work good. Take along my Gibson JF45 made by women during World War II, coffee stained stack of maps, a little propane stove, a pile of old quilts, a can opener, kipper snacks, smoked oysters, gun powder tea, a copper teapot, and a good sharp knife. Sometimes you have to go -- look for your life. 

I'll park by some rivers, cook up some rice and beans, read Ferlinghetti out loud, talk to the moon tell, her all my life tales, she's heard them many times. I'll make up some new juicier parts, drink cold whiskey from a tin cup, sit in a lawn chair and fiddle with my memories, close my eyes and see. Sometimes you gotta go not look for nothin'.
The Northwest is good, once you get off I-5 and wander up and down the Willamette dammit, on the back back roads. I know a few people who'd let me park in their drive, plug in for a night or two, stay up late, and talk about these crazy times -- the blandification of our whole situation. And then back to the woods. A dog is bound to find me sooner or later. Sometimes you gotta not look too hard -- just let the dog find you. 

 Then head south and east, maybe through Nevada, the moonscape of Utah. Stay in some weird campground where Rodney and Marge keep an eye on things. Everybody's got a story, everybody's got a family, and a lot of them have RV's. I'm on my way to the Ozarks, to the White River and the Kern. Those small mouth are great on a fly rod. And they're not all finicky like trout. Trout are English and bass are Polish. And if I wasn't born in Central Europe I should have been. Maybe it's not too late. Sometimes you have to dream deep to find your real life at all. 

I might go on over through Memphis. I played a wedding at the Peabody Hotel once twenty odd years ago, and everybody danced. Usually they just set there and stare. A few at least sway. The roads are stupid crowded everywhere. Kids coming along are used to it -- all wired up and ready, or wireless I guess, and even readier. World peace is surely on the horizon, once us old fuckers die. I'll do my part, but first I wanna to go across Tennessee into North Carolina. Fish some of those little mountain streams, catch some brook trout which are God's reminder that creation is a good idea. The world we've made scares the hell out of me. There's still a little bit of heaven in there and I wanna show it due respect. This looks like a good spot up here. You can try me on the cell, but most places I wanna be it doesn't work. Sometimes you got to listen hard to the sounds old Mother Earth still makes -- all on her own.

Monday, August 19, 2013

When Brands Lose Their Way

All too often, leading brands lose their way. Polaroid. Eastman-Kodak. PanAm. Wang. Digital Equipment (DEC). The history of business is littered with such stories. But why did these once industry-leading companies stumble? They were pioneers in their fields. Yet, their names are no longer with us or, in the case of Kodak, a pale imitation of its once great self.
     Collapses like those occur for a variety of reasons, depending on the circumstances. They can arise from a combination of factors, such as when a weak economy creates opportunities for an upstart competitor to poach customers with a less-expensive alternative and/or a more robust version of the industry leader’s standard model.
     The failure is gradual. It happens because the industry leader is slow to respond to an evolving marketplace, placing false confidence in an established position atop the market.
Polaroid and Eastman-Kodak both reacted too slowly and tardily to the advent and quick adoption of digital photography. PanAm didn’t adapt to a newly competitive airline industry when U.S. regulatory controls were eased, opening the field to a plethora of discount competitors.
     Likewise, Wang and Digital Equipment ignored the coming of the PC, first from IBM and then the clones. Where are Wang and DEC today?

Lazy Certitude
At the heart of such failures, we can usually find a lazy certitude that the status quo will continue ad infinitum. That belief is accompanied by a loss of connection between the people who comprise the companies and the essence of their brand – i.e., what it stands for. Brands must stand for promises made to customers – be it quality, cutting edge technology, responsiveness, superior customer service, or any number of other reasons that people choose one brand over another.
     Companies stumble because the brand promise gradually erodes and becomes hollow bluster, echoing an earlier self-image built on promises actually delivered. This bluster masks a reality of unfulfilled promises and a lack of requisite confidence of the people that make brands live every day. This confidence is built on leaders, managers and employees living the brand promise every day in every thing they do.
     That loss of confidence and connection to what the brand once stood for occurs across the organization – and it festers. Lack of confidence produces more of the same and greater disconnection from the promise of meeting or exceeding customer expectations.
     This can be a natural trend affecting any business, but in this era, the speed at which change happens and impacts organizations is far faster than ever before.

Trend Spotting
Spotting such trends and arresting them begins by recognizing and acknowledging that the organization has lost its core meaning, lost touch with what made it great and the leader in its field in the first place. It may still be the leader, but not much longer if its promise is being eroded by an organizational disconnect.
     It is coasting on its established reputation. It is moving from one quarter to the next focused on revenue and profitability, but without a shared sense of purpose or definition of what it is, or what it stands for. Is this your company today?
     What are your brand promise, vision, and mission? Are they just words on paper, or are the employees, managers and leaders really living them in what they do every day? Are the words and phrases dynamic – which is to say, do they evolve and grow as circumstances change, or are they a mere snapshot of what you once were?
     The challenge around reviving a brand or market position is not so much a revision or reiteration of the words and phrases that describe the brand. Rather, it is the imperative to reconnect every person in the organization and what they do with the true meaning of the venture – its core purpose, mission, vision, and the promises it makes to its constituents. The outcome of that exercise may very well be a complete revision of the brand promise, mission and vision.
     But at the outset, put aside completely the fixation on the words. Rather, work to guide individual employees to rediscover and rebuild their confidence in what the company and the brand signify, thereby reaffirming the brand promise. Assure their focus is on continuing to deliver on the promise that the brand represents so that customer experiences reaffirm it.

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Life Lessons Learned on Playing Fields


As a schoolboy, like many other kids, I played Little League baseball. In high school, I ran cross-country and track.
     Mind you, I was never a star athlete. My baseball career ended when I was too old for Little League. And my long distance running times were mediocre, at best. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy myself or get a lot out of the experiences. I’m still a baseball fan, and continued running recreationally into my adult years, including competing in a half-dozen marathons.
     Aside from the fun of competition, the lessons I learned from participating in sports were deep and have stayed with me to this day. It’s why I feel strongly that children should compete in sports – aside from the obvious health benefits.
     Lesson number one is the importance of preparation. Second is tenacity. Lastly, there’s also what we learn in being a member of a team.

Preparation
The best ballplayers in the Major Leagues are the ones you see on the field before every game taking batting practice. Even the veterans. Especially the veterans. They take multiple swings. Meanwhile, the best infielders will field countless grounders in practice.
     In my brief high school career in cross-country and track, our best runner always ran before school and after school – even in the off-season. When we finished our after-school practice, he’d keep running. The rest of us were too exhausted from our workouts and never felt the urge to join him in his extended runs. He was singularly dedicated.
     As a senior, he won the both California state mile and cross-country championships. I wasn’t surprised, though I was certainly impressed.
     The same holds true in business. We do our best work and feel most confident when we know what we’re talking about – and I mean really know it. Conversely, when we come into a meeting without previewing materials, without preparing, without thinking through the purpose of the meeting and our role, we often make fools of ourselves. Worse, we waste other people’s time.
     It’s a lesson we learn in Little League, and other youth sports. If you showed up for a game having missed practice, chances are the coach was not going to let you play – not as punishment, but because you weren’t ready.

Tenacity
Being involved in sports also teaches you to be persistent. Clearing a given height in high jump or pole vault is an immediate goal. After failing on the initial try, true competitors don’t stop. They give it another go. Same with the miler, the shortstop, or the running back when their efforts fall short.
     I would take third place (or worse) in the mile at a track meet, running slower than I knew I was capable of. My coach spoke encouraging words after such performances and helped me appreciate my true abilities. I came away with a desire to go back the next time with renewed determination, a resolve to practice harder, and a yearning to push myself harder during the next race through the pain that had held me back.
     Again, it’s an important lesson for business, where we may fail to win an account, or fall short of performance metrics. We don’t quit. Instead, we carefully examine what we did that led to the less-than-satisfactory outcome and make appropriate adjustments for future such endeavors. And that generally means putting in a more strenuous effort and, likely, more time.

Contributor
While the foregoing lessons are valuable, perhaps the most important one learned as an adolescent team member is one’s role as a contributor to a larger entity. Though every team has its standout members, the collective unit, as a whole, succeeds on the sum total contribution of all its members.
     Superstars in team sports cannot beat the other teams alone without his/her teammates and their varied contributions.
     Similarly, no business succeeds on the genius and drive of its founder and/or leadership team. Instead, it depends on the collective genius and efforts of many people at all levels of the organization, each doing his/her job well, each striving for excellence in their own area of responsibility, each focused on business goals.
     Our individual knowledge and awareness of our unique role and responsibilities as part of the larger operation is critical to the organization’s succeeding or failing. The best leaders are those that not only communicate the importance of the individuals’ contributions and the significance of their excellence, but also really comprehend and appreciate its value, and lead the team accordingly, identifying and addressing overall weaknesses.
     In the end, aren’t we all striving for the level of performance we sought as young sports enthusiasts? Isn’t our role as members of a business team ultimately an extension of the roles when we played on a Little League team? Those were valuable lessons we learned as kids, and we’d be wise to think of them not only as nostalgic memories but also as life lessons to be held dearly.

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Change may be tough, but it’s what we want



Change brings ambiguity and challenges to our lives. So we don’t like it, and our natural reaction is to fight it. But while we may try to resist change and bristle at the stress it gives us, we are also its primary drivers.
       Consider the devices we use and the services we’ve come to expect. Were those available to us some five, 10 or 15 years ago? Most likely, many were not. Imagine a world today without smartphones, 24/7 online shopping, or the ability to watch TV programs whenever we want. 
        In the 1987 movie “Wall Street,” this is what a cell phone looked like     ➡  ➡  ➡ 
        It was so expensive that only millionaires like the fictional Gordon Gekko could afford one. By the way, the reception wasn’t that great, and it weighed a couple of pounds. Not very convenient.
       So what happened? It was consumer demand – ours – that drove the development of technologies and capabilities we take for granted today: a smartphone in the pocket, an HDTV at home, and a hybrid car in the driveway.
       No, we didn’t explicitly ask for the many modern devices and conveniences we now take for granted. We never asked for the remarkable smartphone apps that allow us to accomplish a range of tasks that were never before possible. But their development and evolution were driven by our unceasing and insatiable desire for smaller, faster, higher quality, cheaper, more convenient, and easier.

Choices become expectations
These are some of the components of change. Consumer choices that have become expectations and then demands, impacts you, no matter your profession. Your demands and expectations. My demands and expectations.
       On Monday morning, we go to work to face the unrelenting pace of change. What passed for quality work a few years ago is unacceptable today. It’s practically a firing offense.   
       As we settle into a “normative” behavior and set of expectations as deliverers of services and goods, along comes a competitor that does it better, faster, or cheaper. And we have to match it or beat it, or we and our company will be left behind.   
       Our boss’ demands seem greater and more oppressive than ever before. But then, so too are his boss’, as well as the CEO’s demands, and the demands of shareholders for ever greater returns on investment. And those ever-increasing returns come from you and your team’s ability to create and deliver better products and services.
       It’s not just our everyday devices like smartphones, TVs and the Internet. It’s health care, transportation and every other component of modern life. Consider just health care.  
       We’ve seen such amazing advances in our lifetimes. Diseases of our youth or our parents’ youth have been either eradicated or controlled, allowing continued life for many people who before would have been condemned to an early death or disablement.
       The health care field – pharmaceuticals, devices, and delivery – continues to improve, continues to impact our lives in ever impressive and heretofore untold ways. Again, those advances are only possible because of people’s ability to adapt to and leverage change. But we have so much further to go, so many horrible diseases to conquer. And that’s change and more change.
       We build our societal growth and advances on what went before. That is the essence of continuous change: constant improvement on what we now have.
       It’s a never-ending cycle, and you’d better get used to it. It’s only going to come at us faster. Then again, we could revert to that shoe-sized cell phone. Somehow, I doubt we will.

Monday, April 29, 2013

What are we measuring?


Businesses today live and die on their return on investment. Companies invest in expansion, marketing, infrastructure and the many other components of the operation. Boards of directors and shareholders want to know whether those expenditures truly bring value and growth.
      No component of the business today escapes ROI analysis. To answer that critical question across the many facets of the business requires measurement to gauge whether the money and time spent on something is yielding the intended results.
      Understandably, then, executives and managers are increasingly focused on measurement in its various forms through any number of means. The growing availability of digital analytical tools is making that more readily attainable on an increasingly regular basis for an expanding list of activities.
      In the rush to quantify anything and everything, the expectation is that we need to monitor those measurements. But monitoring means more than just logging numbers and percentages. We must also gain insights from them and make adjustments in our decision-making.
      For marketing departments, for instance, weekly fractional ticks of market share up or down can mean millions of dollars, plus or minus. Determining the thrust of an expensive promotional campaign is built on the reactions of focus groups and measures of message penetration.

Internal Analytics
But when we start measuring what’s happening among the people inside the organization, what are we chasing?
      Let’s assume we can get a monthly read on what the employees are looking at on the internal website, how many are viewing what, for how long, what they’re doing with it, who they’re sharing what with, etc. Also, we can discern what they’re chattering about on internal social media.
      But what do we do with that information? Do we become obsessive about it? Do we become reactive? Do we become too reactive?
      Monitoring employee communications is certainly a critical and potentially valuable capability, insofar as it enables us to respond to employee information needs and adjust what we provide them, when, and through what channels. Beyond that, what are we looking for?
      The problem with such monitoring is its potential to entice us to get ahead of ourselves – ahead of a curve that may or may not be critical, a curve that we may or may not be able to define – to make us too smart by half when what we need to be providing to our internal audiences is something far simpler than what analytics might lead us to believe.
      At base, employees are just trying to do their job, to be good at it, to get better, to be acknowledged for their contributions, and to be aware of and understand the relentless changes that they and their company must adapt to.

Providing Relevance and Context
As communicators, our primary role then is to provide the context and information to help employees stay abreast of the shifting marketplace and its multiple impacts on them and the company. If we do our jobs well – everything else being equal – then the company thrives, employee attrition stays low, and high quality talent is attracted to the company.
      In the alternative case, the business fumbles its opportunities, under-estimates challenges, and fails to meet revenue and profit targets. The best talent leaves and the mediocre remain. Growth and success elude the organization.
      In the short-term, measuring the quality of our employee communications, then, becomes an opportunity to stay on top of and eliminate the gaps in understanding among the internal audience that can fester into poor performance or activities that don’t add value.
      Monitoring the conversation inside the organization should be less about numbers and percentages and more about the content and context of that conversation. If our analytics and monitoring allows us to determine whether key messages are resonating or not, then they become truly valuable. They can give us critical and timely guidance to help us adjust our content, relevance, cadence and context to assure maximum effectiveness.
      So in that regard, yes, measurement is important and can be valuable. Rather than becoming obsessed with tenths of percentage points that measure intranet traffic, we must focus instead on delivering timely, relevant information and context. That is how we will contribute to the success of the organization and its people. And that’s how we deliver return on investment.