Lemons, Lemonade, & Lululemon

So it’s no secret that the mall is in trouble. A number of factors have put this american institution in hot water; the current economy, changing consumer preference, renaissance in boutique shopping, the internet, you name it. The farther we seem to progress as a society, the smaller the mall seems to grow in the rearview mirror.

Tonight I had some errands to do, and having not been to a mall in probably a year, I decided to check it out. I’m not a fan of malls at all, but on a Thursday night I knew it wouldn’t be too bad. In general everything was pretty empty. Sales associates lounged around waiting for the night to end. There were a few uncomfortable situations where the people that work the hair extension carts were shaking down random passers-by, but mostly things were pretty dead. Then I walked past the Lululemon store.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hey Ryan: What’s the future of “strategy”?

Hey Ryan, you and I have been dancing around this question for a few weeks, so I thought it’s time to put it to the real test – let’s hang it on the blog and work it out. I’ve been really excited to see where some of the more unanswerable questions have gone; the harder they are, the more interesting things become.

We do a lot of work around “strategy”. It’s sort of an abstract concept, and it’s so overused, sometimes the word verges on losing its meaning. I went in search of a concise, useful definition not so long ago…I found a really nice definition from a designer named Barbara Ballard here. She defines it quite simply…

Strategy is the plan for how to compete.

I like that simple definition because, in practice, things get messy fast. A strategy can be a shared agreement that drives the businesses, it can be a constraint that helps people make execution decisions, it can be a guideline for handling the competition. When done well, and communicated correctly, a good strategy can create an amazing business.

Strategy as we know it has changed so much in the last 30 years (more, even). Some of this takes root in the popularity of MBA programs that encouraged us to build strategies assembled from industry best practices. Then, as accounting and computer systems allowed us to gather more and more data, we saw movements toward quantitative rigor and evidence-based decision making. Supply-chain optimization gave use six-sigma and the Toyota production systems. The evolution of software gave use enterprise planning and other real-time management tools. And throughout the whole period we’ve slowly been getting our head around how much organizations and culture play a huge role in how we do what we do. All of these elements compound and complicate how we formulate strategies. There are some bedrock concepts that seem to forever guide us, but as a rule this field is moving at serious clip.

On top of all this, we work in radically new ways. This shift in communication has completely changed the way we approach strategy – the quicker a company can serve and communicate with it’s customer, the more options (and pitfalls) it creates. Taking it to the extreme, I’ve even heard arguments for customers first, strategy later.

Ok, this is all getting a little dramatic, so I’ll get to the ask…

Acknowledging that predicting the future is futile, but understanding that it’s important to understand what could be next, what do you think is the future of strategy?

The Magic Bite

I caught up with Dan Bomze this week in the office. Now I don’t know Dan that well, but I notice that every time I catch up with him I always walk away pretty inspired. He’s a amazing thinker, a good listener, and an all around great guy in my opinion. He’s also a pretty inspirational business personality – he along with a few others founded Cleanwell.

Today Dan told a great story around this personal maxim he calls The Magic Bite. The idea is that when your get chinese food (or any meal really), you always have one more bite of food than you should. After that last bite you feel too full, you’ve eaten too much, you’ve spoiled a good thing. The Magic Bite is that next to last bite of food. It’s about know when you’ve had just enough of a good thing.

Those are some wise words that go way beyond food…

Third Moment of Truth?

I was in a client meeting today thinking about P&G’s fabled Moments of Truth. The ‘truths’ are marketing lingo for a few moments in the consumer experience where the consumer discovers a product and decided that product may be what they need, (first moment). Then, later, as the consumer uses the product they determine if the product actually delivers on the promises it has made to the consumer (second moment).

I’ve always liked the idea of these two moments working together, it’s kind of a nice reminder to not over-promise what you can offer. It’s also reinforces the importance of having continuity between your identity/packaging and your product. At one time or another, we’ve all been really excited to buy something only to be disappointed later with the results of what we’ve bought. In that case, the first moment was won, but the second was lost…you have to nail them both, I like this act of bringing things into harmony.

Read the rest of this entry »

Investing with the Crowd

An interesting article in the NY Times yesterday detailed a tech start-up called KaChing. The site basically allows people to create mock portfolios and try their hand at investing in the market. The big news in the NYT article is that KaChing now allows you to be able to create actual investment portfolios that mimic user portfolios on KaChing.

The site seems to have built some pretty interesting ideas around investor transparency – you can see current holdings and trades, investors are rated on returns over time, etc. The metrics aren’t so different from what’s offered by mutual funds (at least on a quarterly basis), but there’s something very powerful about the service being framed around an actual person. It also allows KaChing to position themselves as an interesting alternative against this big, evil, opaque $10T mutual fund industry.

Read the rest of this entry »

Airline Hatred and Online Aggregators

Ok, so I hate airlines.

Actually, there’s a little more to it. In general, I’m OK with the flying experience. I know it could be better, but for the most part, it’s good hearted people doing the best they can in a very tough, complicated, interlocking service industry. (Full disclosure: my bother is a pilot.)

The hatred I have for airline comes from their management decisions. I hate them for their inhuman inflexibility. I hate them for their nickel and dime tactics. They remind me of banks, both lay out very narrow rules of engagement and give themselves the right to tax you if you deviate from the plan. They let the policies play bad cop and stand unaccounted for some pretty unfair treatment.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hey Ryan: I’d Measure for Experimentation

So in our ongoing online nerd-out, Ryan posed the following question around measuring innovation:

If you had to measure one thing, just one thing, for (growth and) innovation, what would it be?

Holy hard questions, how am I supposed to answer that? Never mind the fact that every major management consultantency and their boutique spin-off siblings are manically running around trying to figure out how to measure innovation, now you’re only going to let me chose one thing? Ok, fine, I like a good unsolvable problem, lets do it.

The nice thing about really hard questions is that it forces you to really break things apart, which is sort of the whole point of this exercise. I started to think about how most metrics actually measure multiple things, it’s a synthesizer of the organization. GE, for example, tracks innovation through measuring organic growth. In that case you have find new revenue and the assumption is that to capture that revenue, you must be innovating to create that value. Diego’s Mileage Metric is a readiness measure that looks for people that have operated in a certain environment AND those products have gone to market. It’s not enough to just be near innovation, you need to have soldiered through the morass.

Read the rest of this entry »

Rebellion on Automattic

Online piracy is a pretty fascinating phenomena if you think about it. In the beginning it was pretty much petty hacker theft; people sharing files because they could. If athletes celebrate their talents by winning races, hackers celebrate their skills and intellect by getting away with things most people can’t. In that vein, there’s a fascinating article in Rolling Stone about a blind phreaker who used to terrorize late-night voice chat lines, bizarre and fascinating – article here.

File sharing is an evolutionary meme. Today, the phrase “meme” is usually synonymous with internet jokes – lolcats, orly owls and the like. However, the idea behind a meme is so much bigger and stronger than internet jokes. By definition a meme is a unspoken idea or agreement that’s transferred around a culture through indirect communication. No one defines it, no one writes it down. Internet jokes are a great example because it’s impossible for everyone to get together and agree something’s funny, it’s funny because everyone’s simultaneously getting the joke. Meme’s are sort of the basic principle behind humor, obscenity, justice, and community – all those very abstract concepts. You know them when you experience them, you’re able to know what it is because you get all the meme.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Twitter plot thickens

This thing is just getting more and more interesting.

Reason 1: The denial-of-service attack that brought Twitter down, could have awoken a sleeping giant – the fact that Twitter is a single point of failure. If that service goes down, the fun stops…and the internet hates it when the fun stops. This Wired article covers some of the particulars, but this sounds similar to something I wrote a few months ago. Mark my words, this event will ultimately spawn the services that displace twitter. Competitors won’t compete directly with Twitter, they’ll just begin to wrap/mask it.

Reason 2: Tweens aren’t Tweeting. I had seen from some of our internal research that Twitter just wasn’t resonating with younger users, but now these reports corroborate that fact. For me this is interesting because (if this service becomes more than a fad) it will be the first service that a younger generation didn’t bring to an older generation. It’s another incident of technology moving in a bidirectional pattern, (which means our society is reaching some comfort/satuation point with technology, it’s no longer an emergent/youth thing). Clay Shirkey had another great example of bi-directional technology movement in his excellent TED talk (the first story, the one about elections.)

As an aside, here’s a great story of how the Twitter was born. Oddly enough, there was a team in pace to build a different piece of software that ultimately became less and less promising. They had to come up with a different idea mid-stream.

My colleague, Diego Rodriguez commented that Twitter works a little like MMPORGs like World of Warcraft. From a distance, it just looks wierd and socially strange. But if you get into it and try to understand all the underlying principles and interactions, it’s infinitely fascinating. (I’m paraphrasing what he said, but I think he’s dead on.)

The Large Market Fallacy

Last week, during a new product presentation, I had an all too familiar moment. We had reached the point in the meeting where it was appropriate to review the business logic behind the concept at hand. At this point the presenter threw up a massive sheet of numbers and calmly commented to the audience, “well, overall this is a $4 trillion dollar market, so we think if we only capture 5% of the market, we’ll earn around $200M in the first year.” She didn’t even blink. (I changed the numbers to protect the innocent…the sad part is they’re lower than the actuals.)

I sort of live for these moments in presentations. It’s probably the same attraction that keeps baseball fanatics glued to their television for hours of what appears to be a pretty boring game. After waiting patiently, and watching things slowly play out, something goes very wrong, At that point, all hell breaks loose. At that point, you see who’s the power player in the room, who’s done their homework, and who’s completely out to lunch. This part of the meeting was pretty mush a wash, that argument basically threw itself out the window. This presenter had just committed a pretty common error, one I now refer to as a Large Market Fallacy.

Read the rest of this entry »