Workplace Engineering

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
I bought the audio book and think I need to by it in print too. The whole idea of turning your business/organization/industry into a platform is incredibly compelling. Kind of wish I’d read it before starting my business.


View all my reviews.

The biggest “aha!” that I’ve had since starting my own business is how difficult it is to get your message out and to encourage potential customers to buy from you. I used to flatter myself that I was a good communicator and could persuade business leaders to follow my recommendations. Since last summer, I’ve found out that moving from selling to internal corporate customers to selling to real customers is like doing well in the little leagues and then walking out into the Superbowl. It’s enough to make you want to change your pants/trousers!

Here are some of the things I’ve learned:

1 - Great sales professionals deserve HUGE RESPECT! It takes a special kind of person to walk into a room, create rapport, build trust, maintain enthusiasm and have the stamina to eventually close the sale.

2 - A lot of sales professionals are not great. We’ve taken mentoring from a number of sales people along the way. As we’ve learned more, we’ve figured out that most just are not that good. Fortunately, we have one in our back pocket now who is causing the scales to fall from our eyes (you know who you are).

3 - The sales cycle isn’t like running a marathon, it’s like sailing around the world! In a marathon you have some control - train and eat well and put on a decent pair of running shoes and you should get to the finish line at some point. If you are sailing, you need the right training, right clothes, right boat, right equipment, right charts, right crew….and then you put to see, hoping that you’ll make all your checkpoints and get to your destination before you sink.

4 - Selling enterprise software is really hard! First you need to find out if a customer for your software actually exists. If you have an application that runs across organizational boundaries, it is especially difficult to find someone who can make a decision. If you can find someone who can be a champion for you, you are now in a race to get through all of the gates to an order before they move on to bigger and better things.

5 - Software is not a complete product (or at least ours isn’t). After spending six months as a pure software play, realized that we actually need to put food on the table. So, we’ve started to consult. Guess what! Now people are starting to get interested in our product…..provided we consult too.

6 - It’s the benefits, Stupid! I have spent six months extolling the features of our portal only to find out that our possible customers don’t really care. They want to know what our product can actually do for them. Our customers may not be able to calculate ROI is or even give a business school definition, but they have a very healthy understanding of what return on investment actually means.

7 - Focus. Focus. Focus. It is easier to sell a product that does one highly targeted thing well than a complicated the cure for world hunger. We’ve moved from selling a general light-weight online dashboard/scorecard that does everything to a services-vendor KPI reporting tool.

8 - It’s all about the customer. I did a Dale Carnegie course last year. It has taken me around a year of soak time to finally get the idea that it really is about them and not about me.

Big Up Respect to great sales people. I think I’ve at least found where the path to sales success starts now. 2009 is going to be about learning more and actually doing it!

Incredible question in the Harvard Discussion Leader article In 2009, Match the Urge to Purge with a Zest to Invest - Bill Taylor:

“For years now, as I have addressed executive audiences around the word, I have urged leaders to ask themselves one simple question: If your company went out of business tomorrow, who would really miss you and why? I first heard this question from advertising genius Roy Spence, who says he got it from strategy guru Jim Collins. Whatever the original source, the question is as profound as it is simple — and worth taking seriously as you evaluate how to navigate through this economic crisis.

Why might a company be missed? Because it’s providing a product or service so unique that it can’t be provided nearly as well by any other company. Because it’s forged a uniquely emotional connection with customers that other companies can’t replicate. Precious few companies meet any of these criteria — which may be why so many companies feel like they’re on the verge of going out of business, even in good times.”

For those of us who decided to launch businesses just before the reversal in economic fortunes, the question that we’ve got to answer is: “If your company went out of business tomorrow, would anyone know you existed in the first place?”

(Via Harvard Business Publishing.)

I’m one of those armchair adventurers who loves to read about the exploits of great explorers and then makes every excuse under the sun why I can’t won’t follow in their footsteps. Not enough money, my kids are too young, overweight, not enough education/ability, bad knees etc. etc.

This is someone who doesn’t make excuses: Adventurer Todd Carmichael Completes 700 Mile Trek from Antarctica to the South Pole Unassisted : TreeHugger:

“Todd Carmichael of Philadelphia, Pa., is the first American to complete the 700 mile trek from Antarctica to the South Pole unassisted. Carmichael arrived at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station at 4:10 p.m. on December 21, exactly 97 years and one week after the first polar explorer Roald Amundsen first achieved the frosty feat.”

My heroes didn’t accept excuses. Shackleton accepted no excuses when it came to getting all his men out of Antarctica. Gandhi accepted no excuses when it came to freeing his homeland peacefully and Nelson accepted no excuses at Trafalgar.

My friend, Ed Harris, asked me today what my New Year’s resolution is for 2009. I’ve decided now:

I resolve that 2009 will be the “Year of No Excuses”

Successfully outsourcing can result in considerable cost savings and performance and capacity improvements for an outsourcing organization and can provide opportunities for economies of scale that would be otherwise impossible.  If an organization could achieve all of its goals by itself there would be no need to  enter into business partnerships and the outsourcing industry in particular would be much smaller than it is today. Ten of the pitfalls an organization faces are:

1. Poor Planning
2. Marry in haste, repent at leisure
3. Faulty Financials
4. Underinvestment in the Transisition
5. Brain Drain
6. Passive Agressive Teamwork
7. The Tower of Babel
8. It doesn’t last
9. Losing the wood for the trees
10. Unrealistic expectations

These pitfalls can be avoided through planning, insight, and a commitment to communication and sustaining the change that comes along with a successful partnership.

Even within supposedly single industries with common training structures, regulated activities and well defined professional organizations there is a surprising amount of disagreement over fundamental definitions of an object, service or performance. 

Turnaround or response times are a key item in many outsource partnerships, yet the start and finish point can be a major point of disagreement. For a customer, the start point may be when they first picked up the phone and had an informal conversation, for the help desk when the work order was actually entered, for the maintenance manager when they got it and the ultimate performer when they were asked to do it.

The possibility for confusion and disagreement around definitions, standards and service levels are enormous. Although reference to recognized to standards endorsed by IFMA, OSCRE, BOMA or other institutions is a great start, time must be taken to develop an agreed set of performance criteria that can be measured and actually reflect a common understanding of the operation or service.

Introducing a new partner into an existing environment or creating a whole new environment out different parties coming together to form a team creates a new dynamic that needs to be worked through to enable the team to perform effectively.

Without knowledge of how involved the client team should be in the day to day running of the operation, there may be a tendency to stay out of the expert’s business. Until there is a problem, that is. 

With pressure from above of dissatisfaction from the recipients of the service there is huge temptation to intervene directly to resolve the problem and become highly directive. Where the partnership was set up to effectively just out-task items or just use the labor of the other party this may not be such a big deal. In partnerships where the goals are more wide ranging, potential strategic benefits can be quickly lost.

In fact, these behaviors are the result of people using “common sense” to fill a vacuum and make an ambiguous situation workable. Preventing this needs management tools that work. 

Understanding and agreeing escalation processes, decision rights and mechanisms for correcting poor performance is critical as is understanding and agreeing the objective criteria for measuring performance and ensuring that a mechanism is in place to collect and share them with the people that need them.

Execute, execute, execute!! The Economist has a great post on Obama’s earnest army. It contrasts the McCain campaign with its focus on traditional political campaigning and Obama’s relentless and highly focused machine.

For all its pretensions to be about “you”, the Obama campaign is strictly hierachical and impressively disciplined.

I’m an expat living here and feel fortunate to have great friends on both sides of the political divide and a ringside seat as the election has unfolded. It is really hard to not be impressed by such a focused (and well funded) mash-up of old school and new school leadership, culture and technology:

• Applied Social Networks - online forums, accessible downloadable information, on-line and real world collaboration opportunities……all focused on a very clear objective
• Supercrunching - action oriented mining of huge databases of information to drive action
• Crowdsourcing - sophisticated technology enabling campaigners to easily organize themselves to pound the streets and keep important voter intentions and tracking databases scarily current
• Detailed scripting at all levels - foot soldiers are told what to say and they say it
• Clear and unambiguous leadership - Obama stays on message, his team stays on message (well mostly) and when they don’t it gets drowned out

The result is a huge, focused army of unpaid supporters that is on-message, disciplined, working phenomenal hours and relentlessly getting one vote at a time.

In addition to underestimating the effort and time required to plan for and procure a partner, the resources and effort required to ensure a successful transition are also often underestimated. The transition phase can last for six to eighteen months after a contract is signed. The results of underinvestment here can result in an unacceptable reduction in service levels and in the worst cases early failure of the relationship.

For a client, this underinvestment can be the result of leaving too small a team in place (or not leaving one at all) to manage to the relationship or not having the necessary skills.

For the vendor partner, this may be the result of leaving the transition team in place for too short a period or rotating key people away from the contract to meet the pressures of other new contracts. For both client and vendor it may also be the result of a complete lack of understanding of the impact that the change may have.

Commercial realities mean that these issues cannot always be avoided, but they can be mitigated through the development of a clear and unambiguous transition plan and lots of feedback between the partners on how the transition is going, developing risks, actions and next steps.

More detail on the process for securing a vendor partner

Pre-qualification (finding suitable parties). This is where an industry consultant can be useful in identifying potentials based upon an understanding of the work, processes and performance criteria. Depending on the size and complexity of the work, this process can take several rounds or happen pretty quickly.

Document preparation. The processes, performance criteria and overall goals established earlier in the process are turned into formal scope of work documents, business requirements, performance metrics, inventories, staffing lists that form the basis of the procurement exercise.

Out to bid (or RFP). Packaging up all the documentation into a standard form, adding contractual terms, building a pricing list and then sending it to pre-qualified bidders. 

Return (of the bids). During this period, the potential suitors work through the documents, ask questions, clarify requirements and generally build a hopefully compliant proposal. This stage culminates in the return of a bid.

Place Order. Once returned, bid documents need to be evaluated and compared. A clean package of outgoing documents containing easy to understand and unambiguous descriptions, criteria and requirements increases the possibilities that the bids will be directly comparable. Pretty quickly front runners will emerge and the team will move to tighten up and negotiate requirements, offers, counter-offers etc. until the favored bidder emerges and a contract awarded.

Start work. Once an order is placed, there is a period of time when both organizations prepare to actually do business with each other. Again, the level of complexity and scope can influence the time, extent and energy. This is a period when the contracting organization can do a lot to ensure the proper integration and success of the new team.