The upside of pursuing an MBA has been the rekindling my interest in reading actual books. Here are some of the books completed this summer:
Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
A solid, quick and entrepreneurial read by the 37 Signals guys.
Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History by David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan
Some great lessons on when to zig when everyone zags.
The Financier by Theodore Dreiser
Dreiser’s tale based on the life of Charles Yerkes, financier and “robber baron”. It took about 100 pages for me to root for the main character, Frank Cowperwood.
4 Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss
Enjoyable and eye-opening read. Worth checking it out.
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
A different historical and enlightening read. I was amazed at how interconnected many of the great men of science have been throughout history.
Born to Run by Christopher McDougall
An addictive read. Made me ditch my orthotics.
Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Another great book by the Heath brothers. Some useful strategies that I have been able to successfully implement.
No More Mister Nice Guy by Robert A. Glover
I came across this book from The Art of Manliness blog. At some point everyone has a lack of confidence. This book has some great ideas on how to get it back.
The 4 P’s (Product, Price, Place and Promotion) are the standard Marketing Mix. This is not just “marketing fluff” the P’s are where the rubber meets the road in CRM, namely quote generation. The 5th P (Problems) still exist with quote generation today.
Product and pricing data are integrated with ERP systems. Promotions live with CRM and for the enterprise are often customer specific. Place in the CRM parlance is the here and now. Sales is looking to book revenue today. The revenue pipeline needs to flow so that the company can grow. It is amazing to me that 5th P (problems) still exist with product and pricing. These problems are identical to problems faced by CRM over a decade ago. Customer-specific pricing is everywhere and is not going away, yet the complexities of this pricing makes quote generation in CRMs nearly impossible. Too many companies have this problem and no one really solves it. Why? Likely the P (price) to fix the P (problem) is way to high and no P (product) or P (promotion) have incentives to fix it in the P (place).
One thing I know about myself is that I am better when I have a full plate. To stay busy, I enrolled in the Evening MBA program at University of Washington’s Foster School of Business last fall. I have been impressed with the curriculum and faculty.
The Blue Ocean Strategy was a recent assignment. The concept is about value innovation. “Red” oceans are known industries and markets. The competition is constantly trying to outperform rivals and the waters bloody. “Blue” oceans are industries and markets that are unknown today. Demand is created rather than fought over with ample opportunity for growth and profit. Blue oceans are often created from red oceans. A competitor finds an opening to create value and finds their blue ocean. Several examples are cited.
The authors, Kim and Mauborgne, are too dismissive of red ocean companies. They state that corporate strategy is heavily influenced by its roots in military strategy. Competition, confronting the opponent and driving him from the battlefield are listed; however this is not military strategy. It is the goal of a direct attack. It made me think how the blue ocean strategy would compare to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, one of the oldest and most successful books on military strategy.
Here are some select passages from The Art of War that conflict with the red ocean view of corporate/military strategy:
1) All warfare is based on deception.
2) In all history, there is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.
3) Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.
Clearly, Sun Tzu would not advocate a red ocean. In contrast, The Art of War is blue ocean:
You can only be sure of succeeding in your attacks is you only attack places that are undefended.
Pretty clear talk of finding uncontested market space, capturing new demand and making the competition irrelevant. In contrast, red oceans are prolonged fights exploiting differentiation or cost. These are commodity markets, not drivers of innovation. Blue oceans are value innovators and clearly have roots in military strategy from the 6th century BC.
When you know your customer (KYC), good things happen.
– Example, Client A increased user adoption to 70% of total call volume. ROI increase 25% in one quarter.
When you know your customer, you can spot trouble a mile away.
– Example, Client B re-organized and has a new executive sponsor. He has called the ROI model into question.
When you know your customer, the relationship goes beyond business.
– Example, Client C asks for advice on improving the ROI model and photography equipment for his vacation.
Big news that Joel Spolsky is ending his Joel on Software blog as announced in Inc. The money quote:
To really work, Sierra observed, an entrepreneur’s blog has to be about something bigger than his or her company and his or her product. This sounds simple, but it isn’t. It takes real discipline to not talk about yourself and your company.
It is true. It has to be bigger than yourself and it does take a lot of time to blog. A lot of people are disappointed. He has a company to run. His choice. The audience will move elsewhere. The video below is a re-post but relevant on the power of blogging. I find myself talking about my tiny little blog more than I ever thought I would. It is true that my traffic is tiny and likely irrelevant. I blog to build my brand and make me better. The blog forces you to think and stay relevant. It is mental pull-ups, push-ups and sit-ups all in one.
Lots of chatter about iPad as the Kindle killer. The chatter is bunk. Kindle has a specific target audience, a niche. That niche loves the Kindle. Niche is the new critical mass.
Look at some of the advantages Kindle has:
Battery Life. Kindle can last up to 7 days without a charge. Seriously.
Content delivery. Kindle has it included. No extra charges or higher price tag.
Readability. Do you want to read a backlit screen all day?
Opening an App Store that people will care about.
The iPad is a very slick device, but it will not be the only one to change the tablet game. Apple App Store developers will start to run into some of the issues that cross-platform mobile developers are dealing with. Namely screen size and incompatible devices. Apple has been very smart with their device hardware and software release cycles. This will become more difficult as different devices begin to proliferate. The iPad will face way more competition than the iPod. Repeating success is, in fact, harder than initial success. Other players and other platforms (HP, Asus, Dell, Everyone on Microsoft or Android) are ready this time. My take is that the biggest losers will be the publishers. Their pricing models will now be more fully exposed to the buying public. That new knowledge will suppress their margins.
One of my rules is to always consider the front office and the back office needs and desires of any CRM project.
I recently came across a service process that generate a large volume of automated tickets. The process was over-engineered. Nearly all of these automated tickets were not true customer service issues. These were more like information notices. The sheer volume of these tickets obscured true customer service issues. The development team did not believe that it was an issue, but they did not have to live with the tickets. Compliance by customer service faltered. Agents took to their own ways of dealing with these tickets. Metrics were called into question. Standard stuff. Remember the usage and compliance needs to work the way that the users do — not the other way around.
Taking a look back on Cloud Service Level Agreements (SLA) from approximately a year ago and seeing what has changed for the enterprise. The SLA is nothing new and have existed in information technology for many, many years. I can tell you firsthand that SLA remains critical to the selling proposition. The questions on uptime, outages and compensation do not have easy answers. It would be nice to see an industry standard on what 99.999% actually means.
The SLA is now out in the open to all users of a cloud utility. There is still an lingering question of uptime. Two significant changes in the past year have been the introduction of new cloud services, like Windows Azure, and the mass adoption of Twitter to report uptime experience in real time.You still do not have a meter or gauge detailing realtime usage or uptime. Concerns still remain around what actually constitutes an outage? A period of time? As a client, how would you prove it? If there was an outage and the client could prove it, how does the client receive compensation? These questions can be answered in as many ways as there are cloud or cloud application providers. It will be interesting to see how improvements to the cloud improve SLAs in 2010.
