January 14, 2013 by Ken Goldstein - 4 Comments

Too Busy To Save Your Company

One of my final posts of 2012 memorialized the brands we lost last year, and inspired the question, how do so many companies so often and so badly miss the boat? It’s even more perplexing when they know where it’s docked, what time it leaves, and who the captain of that departing ship is. Seems they are just too busy to make their way to the boarding gate.

Yep, you could have found your way out, met the challenge of Creative Destruction, and banked the opportunity by reallocating resources from historic enterprises to future growth, but you didn’t. How does that keep happening?

In a recent Wall Street Journal profile, longtime media executive Strauss Zelnick, who has worked his way through several platform shifts, summarized it perfectly:

One of the problems with some of the diversified media conglomerates is you get the benefit of the cash flow of legacy assets and the burden of owning legacy assets. You own a motion-picture company and you should be thinking about what digital technology will do to your business. But when you wake up in the morning you’ve got to be on the phone with the folks in your studio, talking about a $200 million picture that’s going to cost $300 million and the star who’s not showing up at work and the marketing plan that’s going to cost you $100 million world-wide.

When someone says to you, “I think you should meet with this guy, he’s 26 years old, he graduated from MIT, he’s in Brooklyn doing a really interesting social media startup,” you say, “It does sound interesting but I’m too busy to do that.”

That happens a lot, way too often. People are so busy in their jobs, ensconced in the past, they have no time to breathe the future. Then the future becomes the present, and it’s too late.

Busy, busy, busy. But is busy the same as productive? Not quite. Sometimes, not at all. Companies intend to keep you busy. If you aren’t busy, or if you at least don’t look busy, you’re probably at risk. But do you add real value, especially in light of constant change?

How we prioritize our time says a great deal about what we value. In leadership positions, we have to manage available time carefully, our “to-do” lists are rewritten each day, week, month, and year as a series of choices. In the simplest examples, we have to decide which emails and calls to answer, which reports to read, which employees and customers to see. On a more grand scale, we have to develop a strategic plan and manage the component tactics that are meant to create value for all stakeholders in that plan.

We have an awful lot of choices to make short-term and long-term. There are things we can change and some we cannot. One thing human beings have yet to do is create more time on the clock. We think we do this by multi-tasking (or foregoing sleep, family, and fun), but we are just borrowing against a fixed asset. The choices we make about priorities have much more impact on the far-ranging output of our ventures than any hour we steal back, the memo we draft during the meeting we’ve decided we can ignore while sitting in it.

Which brings us back to the most important question—are we not only busy, but productive? Are the choices we are making that comprise that busy state truly adding value commensurate with our position and expectation? Surely meeting with every young entrepreneur or technologist who fires off a business plan would be impractical, in fact irresponsible! Think of all the wasted time given the low the hit rate for unproven initiatives. Many executives choose to delegate this kind of responsibility to a new box on the org chart—for a while it was vogue to have a Chief Innovation Officer. I was sourced on what I thought of that several times over the past few years, to which I replied, isn’t the CEO always the Chief Innovation Officer? And if she or he is, doesn’t everyone on the leader’s team, up and down the line, know immediately they are a de facto part of the solution by virtue of the reporting structure? Remember the old maxim—what my boss finds interesting, I find fascinating.

Carving out discretionary time might be the most important thing an executive can do—thinking time, learning time, creative time—and yet, where does it get prioritized? Too often somewhere between doing an expense report and tidying up your desk, after hours when you’re exhausted. What if you scheduled an hour at the beginning of each day specifically for exploratory purpose? Or if not at the beginning of the day, as a respite sometime during the day? You could block it on your calendar like an appointment with your boss, inviolable, as important as anything else you are doing. You could make it clear to those around you that you want them to help you fill that hour with introductions to out-of-the-ordinary people, invitations to exhibits, maybe just an obscure white paper on a tangential topic. Your hour could then become their hour, and the exploration could cascade. Would you catch every single opportunity that might have eluded you? Doubtful. But would you instill a culture of openness where meaningful resources were clearly dedicated to the unknown? It couldn’t hurt.

Just walking that walk, talking often about your natural curiosity, leading by example to set the tone for the mandate and institutional respect of creativity, yeah, I think that would help. There is a good deal of room between having to ingest every new idea that comes your way and fully delegating innovation to an isolated “special projects” department. Balance in leadership is critical, making good on today’s commitments while preparing for tomorrow, and it would be hard to maintain respect in an organization for a boss who neglected contractual obligations that paid the bills to wander aimlessly in dreamland.

Clearly there is no textbook approach on getting this right or fewer companies would fail, but leaders who strive to find a workable balance between maintaining focus on existing lines of business while bridging access to the unknown—even if only by maintaining an honest open-door policy—seem to have a better shot at extended shelf life. Whenever I worked for someone who did this, who asked me to bring them interesting stuff to look at that may not have mattered to everything else we were doing, that made me think harder about everything we weren’t doing to deflect the attackers quietly sneaking up on our castle. It also led to a few projects over the years I never would have conceived could make a difference in our business.

Fostering a culture of openness is much more promising than insisting on a culture of busy-ness. And there you have it, that strange root word that compels us to activity often in abstraction of thought. We need both to survive, don’t you think? If you have a moment, get back to me on that—although I will understand if your dance card is full. In fact I expect just that.

December 30, 2012 by Ken Goldstein - 2 Comments

The Last Word on This Election Year

All week I have been trying to devise a clean getaway post for the year 2012 and it has been a struggle. Then performance on demand, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan did the heavy lifting for me in this weekend’s edition of her column, Declarations. Because I can’t say it any better than she does, here is an extended excerpt from her article on what she got correct and wrong in covering this year’s Presidential Election, in particular, what she got quite right:

In writing about what struck as the president’s essential aloofness, I said there were echoes of it even in his organization. I referred to a recent hiring notice from the Obama 2012 campaign. “It read like politics as done by Martians. The ‘Analytics Department’ is looking for ‘predictive Modeling/Data Mining’ specialists to join the campaign’s ‘multi-disciplinary team of statisticians,’ which will use ‘predictive modeling’ to anticipate the behavior of the electorate. ‘We will analyze millions of interactions a day, learning from terabytes of historical data, running thousands of experiments, to inform campaign strategy and critical decisions.’ “

This struck me as “high tech and bloodless.” I didn’t quite say it, but it all struck me as inhuman, unlike any politics I’d ever seen.

It was unlike any politics I’d ever seen. And it won the 2012 campaign. Those “Martians” were reinventing how national campaigns are done. They didn’t just write a new political chapter with their Internet outreach, vote-tracking data-mining and voter engagement, especially in the battleground states. They wrote a whole new book. And it was a masterpiece.

Hats off. In some presidential elections, something big changes, and if you’re watching close you can learn a lesson. This was mine: The national game itself has changed…

For those who followed the FiveThirtyEight blog by newly minted celebrity Nate Silver most of the year, the numbers were the story, and the importance of understanding the underlying truth to the numbers brought a new tone to political commentary. Data tells a story, but the story is seldom obvious. You have to dig through numbers to see what they are saying. Statistics don’t create strategy, they inform it. You try an unending number of contact experiments in outreach, measure tactical responses carefully against controls, see what is working and what is not, reevaluate and act. The secret is, you must do this on a one to one basis, scale personal interaction without treating people as a mass, without using a blunt instrument to address pushback and slow acceptance.

Data can be aggregated and cut, but it comes from somewhere, individual people. If you read the data in geographic and demographic segments, it can help guide both strategy and tactics, allowing you to be responsive in near real-time. Your core remains your ideas — conviction, creativity, and vision — but how you express those ideas better to achieve consensus, how you improve your message, how you harness the power of a devoted following to add their deeply personal beliefs to the mix and build a unified voice with impact, that is where data is your friend. Yet it’s critical to fully appreciate and understand that friend, with humility, with nuance.

There isn’t much commentary I recall from the endless talking heads covering the election, but one almost throwaway interchange I remember was led by longtime political analyst Jeff Greenfield. He was admiring just how expert Nate Silver’s predictions had been across the board, calling the electoral votes in advance for all 50 states, when he sort of joked, and I paraphrase from memory, “Well, I guess those of us who got into journalism because we liked English in school so much we could use it as an excuse to avoid math, we can’t make that assumption anymore.” That simple concept seemed profound to me. In the same way we can no longer draw clear lines in organizations that identify and confine analog departments, the separation between language and numbers in our thinking has naturally blended. They may appear to be separate areas of study, but our connected world of internet communication, social media, dramatic global speed, and authority transfer to communities has put words and mathematics on a collision course of unified discipline. As integrated tools, they are perhaps becoming more the same than they are different, inseparable in decision-making.

The lesson here is hardly isolated to politics, it is a story of marketing at large. If you have spent any time trying to understand e-commerce, you know well the power of data and the risk associated with ignoring it. Great products and services have no substitute, but as a former boss taught me long ago, good marketing helps bad product fail faster, and bad marketing can undermine the best of innovation. Both right and left brain are now requirements to win in business. Fail to master either at your own peril.

My last word on this election year: Analytics.

Necessarily reflective of authentic, individual voice.

Thank you so much for continuing to share this journey with me. Here’s to an informed and inspiring new year!

December 18, 2012 by Ken Goldstein - 10 Comments

Brands In Memoriam 2012

Frequent readers of this blog know that I am obsessed with the concept of creative destruction, the intangible but daunting market force where an invention that is vital takes out that which has become defunct, and the nascent replaces the established. For those of you just stopping by, you will find any number of mentions of creative destruction as you page through my posts on innovation—it represents for me all that is true and real in deploying creativity to survive in business, perhaps best captured in the title of Andy Grove’s definitive book, “Only The Paranoid Survive.”

As a result of creative destruction, every year we add more once significant names to the Dead Brand Graveyard. Recent memory had us bid adieu to such iconic enterprises as Palm, Saab, Lehman Brothers, Zenith, Compaq, Borders, Circuit City, Ritz Camera, CompUSA, Mervyn’s, Friendster, Tower Records, Polaroid, and Kodak. I polled my network on Facebook for suggestions to include this year and got way more than I could include in a single blog post, many of which could be argued are still on the bubble; some have already quietly jumped the shark, others are still operating as near zombie brands, not yet coming to terms with their imminent vaporization. I invite those dear friends who offered their suggestions to include them in the comments below—as well as anyone else who can see what is certain to end badly—as internal politics and stagnating ideas cause those who should know better to obscure the mandate of leadership.

Here then are my top label farewells for the current calendar year:

Continental Airlines: As a result of the merger between United and Continental, the marketing folks did the right thing and picked one brand to make it easier to find your tail logo on the runway. Was anything really lost if this was just a merger? Ask the people (like me) still stuck flying United—yeah, the customer experience did the impossible and took another plunge. If you aren’t 1K at this point in your frequent flyer status, melt down your Premier Card, there are so many top dogs in the system the rest of us matter not, kiss upgrades goodbye. Choice on routes? Funny how the routes and times keep getting de-duped. It’s ironic that an industry that flies you around in the sky at 500 mph and largely invented the modern loyalty program today can’t come up with more clever ways to achieve growth than eliminating its own competition—plus five extra inches of leg room, baggage checks, and those yummy inflight box lunches are now upsells. The parade of eliminated airline brands welcomes another, while customers fume with rising prices and deteriorating service. Hard to believe this is a path to long-term health and improved profits in a backbone industry our economy needs to thrive.

Fresh & Easy: This expansion into the USA didn’t go so well for UK grocery titan Tesco. Any ideas why? Been in one? Okay, that’s a good start. Here’s another—where was the segmentation analysis? Same prices and quality as the giant American supermarkets like Safeway, but a smaller footprint and thus fewer shelf offerings. Same footprint and attempted laid back environment as Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s, but no real upscale inventory warranting premium prices or nice people to kibitz with you at checkout. No meaningful differentiation to be found, and small parking lots, too. Ready made portions for young working professionals weren’t a home run in a market with as much choice and variety as ours. Head on competition with Wal-Mart—which can operate at scale near 3% net income while it’s strategically expanding in the grocery category—was a capital-intensive bet inclusive of acquiring real estate and building new stores, a tough play requiring far-ranging commitment and vision to warrant the pain. Without either, Tesco cut its losses and retreated.

Newsweek: This one is spiritually sad for us old school hard news and analysis junkies, except that I cannot remember when I last touched a copy of this magazine, even in a dentist’s office. Bought in 2010 from The Washington Post by audio magnate Sid Harman for $1 and assumption of the losses, ostensibly for sentimental reasons, it was then merged via IAC with The Daily Beast and put under the direction of star editor Tina Brown (there’s a cost saving measure, huh?). Circulation and ad rates for the print version of Newsweek never regained momentum sufficient to cover costs, so this year we heard announcement that the print edition is ceasing. Can Newsweek digital-only survive as a differentiated masthead next to The Daily Beast? Can you imagine a good reason to continue two separate editorial teams? Can you imagine the same editorial team producing two presumably different publications? Have you tried to sell display advertising lately for vertical online editorial products? And just what is a News-Weekly in the age of internet microsecond breaking info copy? At 79 years on the newsstands and in mailboxes, Newsweek had a good run, it just stopped evolving.

Hostess: It seems obvious to many that the sub-brands of 85-year-old Hostess will live on post the uber bankruptcy, and there will be some snack distributor out there continuing to put Twinkies, Ho-Hos, and Ding-Dongs on grocery store shelves everywhere (other than Fresh & Easy, see above). The master brand is likely to die with the corporate entity, as executive management was unable to make a deal with the labor union representing the workers who made the Twinkies, Ho-Hos, and Ding-Dongs. So 18,000 people lost their jobs because no deal could be reached between managers and workers? I don’t think that’s the whole story. Try a balance sheet too weak to support internal investment after emerging from a prior bankruptcy with private equity imposed debt and mounting unfunded pension obligations. The real culprit in my mind—you got it, thinner margins and declining market share due to lack of innovation. Hostess management—now asking for bonuses in liquidation—failed to bring relevant new products to market in a climate where obesity and diabetes became part of the vernacular. Wonder Bread may have been the greatest thing since… whatever came before it, but not in a world of seven grain all natural high fiber baked fresh daily, sliced thick and thin or not at all, your choice.

Blackberry: I am going out on a limb here, calling the magnificent former high-flier from Research in Motion dead even though launch of a new platform has been loaded into the cannons for ignition. Why do I say it’s gone with two new Blackberry’s rolling out as soon as next month? As noted in the Wall Street Journal last week, “Consulting firm IDC recently estimated that RIM’s share of the global smartphone market stands at 4.7%, down from 9.5% at this time last year and from more than 50% in 2009.” Sorry, but when a company has less than 10% of the market share it had three years ago, I am not sure how you could classify a recovery as anything more than a dangling lifeline. What went wrong? Ever try to use the Blackberry browser? There is no word in our language of which I am aware to adequately modify the word slow. With an extremely late to market touchscreen interface, where was the incentive for app developers to develop apps? Those of you who know me know my devotion to the thumb driven analog keyboard, but when I tossed it in for an iPhone 5, I knew the rest of the thumbers were coming too.

There were a number of brands suggested by my colleagues as sighted on death watch, but I’ll let those opinion makers chime in themselves and go out on their own limbs as I did with Blackberry. I have my suspicions about who might be on deck for next year’s list, but I will keep those sealed for now in a paper envelope so as not to publicly curse them or too soon embarrass myself for being wrong. Some in the soon to be gone circle I still like and am hoping for a comeback, though not many.

I think I may make this an annual feature. History would suggest I won’t have much trouble coming up with a list each year. Why chronicle the abdicated? Creative destruction is permanently embedded in our business culture, and even the greatest company can be gone in a single product cycle if customers aren’t understood to be our ultimate boss. With constraints on distribution forever less a moat and abundant technology a ceaseless path to increased consumer choice, business leadership requires nimble execution, unending responsiveness, and gracious humility to constantly win anew customer loyalty. It’s a lesson we all need front and center to do our jobs honestly and well: Innovate quickly or die.

December 6, 2012 by Ken Goldstein - 2 Comments

A Simple Secret Weapon

Ever hear the catch phrase, “Try to catch someone doing something right?” It’s from The One Minute Manager (1981) by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson. No matter how many times you hear it, it doesn’t get enough airplay. Apparently, it is way too easy to forget or ignore.

A recent story in the Wall Street Journal by Sue Shellenbarger titled “Showing Gratitude at the Office – No, Thanks” got me to stop and digest the quoted statistics twice before posting a sustained gasp across all my social networks. Here’s a telling clip:

Research suggests that employees who feel appreciated are more productive and loyal. But that message hasn’t reached many of those in charge. Some bosses are afraid employees will take advantage of them if they heap on the gratitude. Other managers believe in thank-yous but are nervous about appearing awkward or insincere—or embarrassing the employee they wish to praise.

A common attitude from the corner office is “We thank people around here: It’s called a paycheck,” says Bob Nelson, an employee-motivation consultant in San Diego.

The workplace ranks dead last among the places people express gratitude, from homes and neighborhoods to places of worship. Only 10% of adults say thanks to a colleague every day, and just 7% express gratitude daily to a boss, according to a survey this year of 2,007 people for the John Templeton Foundation of West Conshohocken, Pa., a nonprofit organization that sponsors research on creativity, gratitude, freedom and other topics.

We can admire business leaders for being tough, for being direct and never taking no for an answer when facing immense challenges, but I don’t think our expectations of their motivational abilities have to end there. Clearly there are at least two schools of thought for executives and managers on driving employees to exceptional results: 1) You can never (or almost never) express appreciation to keep employees guessing about what you think of their performance and push themselves harder; or 2) You can offer praise when it’s earned, heartfelt, and precisely the unexpected good word a dedicated employee needs to hear when a job is well done.

When praise is withheld purposefully as a tactic to prohibit an employee from becoming self-satisfied, I suppose I can see the envisioned logic in that, but that logic is flawed. When a boss is constantly lavishing praise to the point where employees simply expect it and the words no longer have impact, I can also see the potential downside, but somehow it doesn’t have me worried. Withholding appreciation for effect is seldom as intentional as some bosses would have you believe. More often it is its own form of laziness, or arrogance, or nonchalance, or unaware omission.

I fondly remember a tough water polo coach I had in high school—a league legend who went simply by the name Mr. J—who used to say, “As long as I am yelling at you from the sidelines, it means I still have faith in you and think you can do better; when I go silent, it’s because I have given up.” It took me a long time to fully interpret that message, and I get it now. First, he told us in advance why he was driving us hard, because he really cared, not so much about winning (that, too) but about pushing us to do our best. There was never a time in the pool when we were getting yelled at that this message was not in our heads. Second, anytime we did something extraordinary, as a team or an individual, he made a point of it in team meetings. So he could have it both ways—he could motivate with the stick, because we knew there was always a carrot. We also knew the stick was highly convincing play-acting, but the carrot was authentic.

When I am on the job as a day-to-day operator, I make a point to meet with my direct reports weekly and my indirect reports monthly, largely for the purpose of setting and reviewing goals. I don’t at all like annual performance reviews (more on that in a future post, I promise), but what I do like is establishing agreed criteria and then constantly measuring against that, quantitatively and qualitatively. I also have a stealth agenda in these meetings, which is to find the surprise in the weekly or monthly status report, the chance to catch someone doing something right and blind side them with a few striking words of praise. You cannot imagine the impact after 55 minutes of goal regression of throwing a quiet knuckle ball at an employee along the lines of a Steve Jobs “Oh, one more thing” moment.It goes something like this: “How did you possibly find the time to _______ with everything else on your plate, and do it so creatively, and so thoughtful—do you have any idea how much an impact that had on your team and our business? Well, I do.”

I’m telling you, try it. It does not matter what level of employee you are motivating, senior management can benefit from a genuine, unprompted, thumbs up jolt just as much as those at the entry-level. Fill in that blank, put it in your own words, point out what is positive but not obvious with conviction and a nod. If you have never done this before, I assure you it will feel party time good. If your employee has never heard it before, watch the size of their eyeballs physically enlarge.

Each month when I am reviewing our team business plan against individual status reports, I pick one person who did something truly special and I send a personal email from me to her or him, no cc’s, and tell them how amazing his or her contribution was. No big bucks bonus, no gift certificate, just a brief email. That email accomplishes two things—it shows you are paying attention, and it shows you care. It buys you a grapevine of goodwill, and a good deal of room to set seemingly unrealistic stretch goals in the periods before or after. Some of you reading this have received one of these. I’ll bet you kept it. The ones I happen to have received over the years—I have kept those.

When a boss whispers, it’s a shout. When a boss shouts, it’s a scream. When a boss high fives, it can be the World Series.

I’m a not asking you to shower undeserved praise—far be it from me to let a team have reason to go soft in these challenging times, that would be inconsistent with my style. What I am suggesting is that the holidays are upon us and that is always a good milestone to say thank you. Say it often, only when it is earned, and be specific—but find a reason, if you have a great team then you have innumerable good reasons.

Yep, the season is upon us. Perhaps we needn’t let our better side be limited to such a narrow window, but at the very least, let’s try to show a little extra holiday cheer. It’s good for business, and it’s good for the people who are the business.