March 5, 2012 by Ken Goldstein - 2 Comments

Beware the Idle Question

In his absurdist play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, playwright Tom Stoppard invents any number of ways for the courtiers to pass the time while Hamlet comes and goes:

Rosencrantz: Do you want to play questions?
Guildenstern: How do you play that?
Rosencrantz: You have to ask a question.
Guildenstern: Statement. One – Love.
Rosencrantz: Cheating.
Guildenstern: How?
Rosencrantz: I haven’t started yet.
Guildenstern: Statement. Two – Love.
Rosencrantz: Are you counting that?
Guildenstern: What?
Rosencrantz: Are you counting that?
Guildenstern: Foul. No repetition. Three – Love and game.
Rosencrantz: I’m not going to play if you’re going to be like that.

Our modest heroes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not involved in serious inquiry. They are burning minutes off the clock. Their fate has already been cast, and although they don’t know that, they are reasonably certain there is not much else they can contribute because they are but secondary players in Hamlet’s drama, even in a new play named after them. Good questions, bad questions, neither really matter, and statements result in a lost point.

Is there a business corollary here? I think so.

When anyone is asked what appears to be a Big Question, it is often a good idea to decipher if the question is real, or if the person asking it is just passing time. When top management in a company asks for “real change,” is the voice authentic, or simply read from a prepared script for the sake of appearances? It is never easy to tell, tone only gets you so far. Knowing the difference may determine whether your full commitment is warranted and can actually make a difference when applied.

Questioning the status quo is the stuff of innovation, the catalyst to progress. A good question can be provocative, inspirational, challenging, a thought starter — but for a question to have the potential to cause impact, it has to be sincere, honest, clearly well-intentioned. Not enough questions are like that. Many only serve to feign engagement. You’ve been in that meeting, right? Me, too.

Some questions become legend. A colleague of mine who worked for a Fortune 100 corporation recalled how shortly after the first dot bomb bubble the CEO turned to him in a strategic planning meeting and said: “eBay, why didn’t you think of that?” He wasn’t sure if it was a joke. It wasn’t. A few months later he was gone. It was his fault the company had missed the shift to digital. It had to be someone’s fault, right?

I still gasp when I think about that.

If the top people in your company are asking how they can have all the benefits of the New World without upsetting too much structured order from the Old World, start provisioning the bomb shelters. If your company is asking what are its core values and how its value propositions can become relevant to new generations of customers, transformation has begun.

Recently in response to my post Creativity and Courage, a friend called me to brainstorm how to more aggressively nudge his company into the 21st Century. He had been hired by that company’s CEO as a change agent, with plenty of vim and vigor to come in and make change happen. He had been asked the multi-billion dollar question: What do we have to do right now to reinvent our business before we are toast?

It had been almost a year since that curious question was posed. Lots of ideas had been floated. Many follow-up questions had been asked, most of them repeatedly. To date, no substantive change had occurred. Blame was starting to appear on the whiteboard where new ideas had been wiped clean to keep the peace — potentially good but uncomfortable answers to the hardest questions were emerging, yet the status quo had largely triumphed without consensus to advance. It was an anxious peace, which led my friend to believe the question he had been asked was more a checklist item than a true strategic mandate. Indeed, a perfunctory question is unlikely to elicit an eye-opening answer. Those charged with asking questions usually get what they want, one way or another.

The second example of questioning is the opposite of the eBay punchline. The first CEO was angry that no change had happened and needed someone to skewer. The second CEO said he wanted change, but not too much, there was no reason to upset people unnecessarily and disrupt workflow with festering speculation. Rumor mills can be ghastly impediments to productivity, particularly when they transmit substance.

Because questions are constructed of words, they can only get us so far. Your real gauge has to be the reaction to your proposed answers, actions of consequence and commitment of resources. If a request to bring change is heartfelt, a door has opened and you have the incredible opportunity to close it behind you. On the other side of that door is risk, and you have no choice but to take it. You can win or lose the whole ballpark, but at least you are in the game. If the request to bring change is just passing time, you really don’t need to answer it, better to avoid it entirely to buy yourself as much time as you can — Powerpoint can be helpful to tread water while your wheels spin. What you really need to do is find someone who asks more honest questions.

Playing at questions can be a pastime or serious business. When asking, do your best to understand the difference. When asked, be ready to know the difference.

Shall we play?

February 17, 2012 by Ken Goldstein - 11 Comments

Do I Have To Eat It?

A recent opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal by Jesse Kornbluth, a onetime devoted and inspired employee of America Online, pondered the question of “How AOL—aka Facebook 1.0—Blew Its Lead.” Kornbluth does a good job acknowledging the irony of overlap between the fallen angel and the rising star—the staggering power of community, the seduction of the walled garden, the financial reward of vast momentum—but more importantly, he gets his head around what he believes to be the downward turning point for his former employer. It was not so much the bursting of the bubble, nor even the distractions of failed promise in the historic merger with Time Warner. As a product person, Kornbluth saw the blood start to flow when those who loved product began to be overruled by those who lived by argument. Those arguments were not the healthy tension of developers debating the relative merits of features and benefits. The conflict shifted to initiatives in product strategy that were driven by individuals who had assured themselves their creative ideas would lead to success, even though they did not much have time to embrace and use AOL they way its creators had previously.

When the consultants arrived, strategy was not driven by those who embraced the product and its audience; strategy became a set of theoretical suppositions evidenced by the competitive landscape. There were only two problems: 1) the consultants were no more obsessively using competitive products than those of AOL; and 2) the competitive landscape was crumbling because it was just as inorganic in construct, itself no more than the conclusions of observation. Using a product is not trying it once, it is using it every day and using competitive products to fully internalize how bad becomes good and good becomes great. Data, analysis, reconnaissance, and interpretation are all essential in responding to hyper growth, but if you aren’t eating your own dog food, all bets are off.

Yes, you must Eat Your Own Dog Food.

Some people trace this edict to the television commercials for Alpo in the 1970s and 1980s where Lorne Greene made a point of showing us that he fed the very product he endorsed to his own dogs. No, he didn’t actually eat it himself, but the way he looked at it, you could tell he might be considering it. His dogs were an extension of himself. That love made it clear he would only feed them a product he trusted, and he would only endorse it publicly because he trusted it. I am not saying he was right. I am just noting than his conviction was visceral.

In the software spectrum, the phrase “Eating Our Own Dog Food” is more commonly traced to a 1988 memo from then Microsoft Manager Paul Maritz, encouraging his team to obsess over use of Microsoft’s products. His basic tenet was that to win a category and perfect your work, you had to be the consumer. The memo spread widely throughout Microsoft, over the gate and through the industry. It resonated with many of us, and began being accompanied by such observations as, “If you won’t use the software when it’s free, why should anyone pay you for it?”

Soon after came the dawn of the Dot-com age in the mid 1990s, quickly followed by the implosion of Web 1.0 known as the Dot-bomb era circa 2000. Interesting to note, a few of the companies that survived the turmoil and went onto become the great first generation brands of the Internet like Amazon and eBay made it a point to eat their own dogfood. While third-party consultants poured into corporations to sort out their tanking business models and rationalize their value propositions, far too many of those consultants were busy writing decks and compiling spread sheets. When you asked them what online products and services they loved, they often couldn’t respond, because they were too overwhelmed by time commitments to use the products they would evaluate, let alone love them. For those who had already been through a product development cycle or two, the writing was on the whiteboard.

The absolute necessity of eating your own dog food is anything but limited to software. If you design cars for a living and are not planning to drive your own creation when it comes off the line, how can you attend to every nuance and detail that sets apart your vehicle from the vast number of choices already available for sale? If your team designs a new line of workplace apparel intended to be marketed as more comfortable, durable, and stylish than everything else already hanging on the rack, will you not be planning to wear what you have produced proudly at least a few days each week out of pure joy? When you have the privilege to be creative and innovative in your occupation, you are quickly humbled by the fact that an idea for a new product or service however inspired and brilliant is in fact almost worthless. Customers seldom buy or become loyal to the ideas you pitch. Until a concept is executed expertly and embraced by those who will champion it, it really is just a first draft—perhaps filled with promise, but nonetheless in need of refinement, iteration, and polish. There is a long and winding road from pitch to product, and all along the way details have to be vetted first by those who most love the work, the creators.

Apple long ago coined this notion as Evangelism, and no Apple Evangelist in his or her right mind would try to get you excited about a product they weren’t already using themselves. To be fair, Evangelism is a beginning, not an end, after which customer feedback must become part of the process, but if our goal in social marketing is to engage our community in a supportive and seamless dialogue, then we owe it to them to initiate the dialogue with honesty, commitment, and passion. There will always be pain to share in early releases, but the more defects we extract ahead of release because we already know they are there, the more our customers can trust us to take them seriously in allowing our own needs to be met before we presume to address theirs.

Design is not cynical; its true elegance is purely self-reflective because form and function are easily evaluated in day-to-day use. If something is good enough for your dog, it might be good enough for someone else’s dog. Now imagine if you ensured it was good enough for you before you topped off the can. That would be some seriously tasty dog food. Go on, take a byte.

February 1, 2012 by Ken Goldstein - 11 Comments

Creativity and Courage

Teddy Roosevelt — who legend has it never wanted to be called by that name — is back in the news, at least to the extent that we are finding reason to quote him of late. In response to an earlier post of mine, a friend who had a challenging year sent me the following quote from Theodore Roosevelt:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

The quote comes from a speech Roosevelt delivered at the Sorbonne in Paris on April 23, 1910, just after the completion of his presidency. He ponders a world which is increasingly industrialized, the role of the common man in its development, and the critical nature of risk in our capitalist economy. Roosevelt is optimistic about America’s role in the New World, the rising living standard for the middle class, and the importance of learning — academic and experiential — to the evolution of our civilization. “The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer,” spoke the former President. He was a champion of character. He had no appetite for the voice of the cynic.

There is a lot of substance in Roosevelt’s reflection, but the essence for me comes back to the notion of the creative process, whether in business or government or science or art, what it means to put oneself in the public light with new ideas. I write a good deal about innovation and creative destruction, how it is essential to the evolution of our norms, but not enough about the drive behind that process, the extremely hard work of dodging the ordinary and then attempting to get others onboard where they might otherwise be uncomfortable. Getting attacked is no fun, but it comes with the territory of the new. Creativity is not only exhausting, it’s messy.

I think this is what Roosevelt was getting at, how leaders in any field first dare themselves to expose a new idea, then attempt to explain that idea to others, then prepare themselves to share the bounty in success or accept the blame in failure, as if neither is more likely or important than the other. The point in finding the courage to advance an untested notion is specifically that, to test it. If the notion proves of merit than the win is broad, but if not, the win is equally broad because the test has eliminated a dead-end we all can acknowledge and use as a new reference point for further testing.

It is the courage to address the critic, the skeptic, that is so uncommon. We know it when we see it, but we don’t see it enough. We are hungry to hear ideas, but too often all we hear is naysaying. It is much easier to be a critic than an innovator, in that the innovator approaches creativity with self-critique an implicit part of the process, a means, not an end. The critic whose work begins and ends there offers opinion, even explanation, but if there is no build on the work of the innovator, then what is the value added?

We hear our political candidates bash each other for sport, so much so that we become numb to it. They are not listening to each other and we are not listening to them so what good is being accomplished by the perpetuating standoff? When this happens in business, companies are lost. When it happens in science, we run in place. When it happens in the arts, our culture becomes stagnant. Roosevelt looked forward and advised us to fear the downside of not trying more than the downside of coming up short.

The individual who has a story to tell risks all, because the more that story is original, the more it is likely to be rejected. Think of the powerful corporations who did not believe we would all have our own computers someday, and the few individuals who thought we would and got them to our desktops. Think of Martin Luther King’s vision for a desegregated America, the resistance against his ideals, and the normalcy today of celebrating diversity. Think of The Beatles dreaming in those seedy clubs in Hamburg, when much of the music establishment was convinced that guitar bands were on their way out. Think of the first doctors and medical researchers to propose the notion of a vaccine, how frightening that seemed to so many, and the diseases we would still suffer today were it not for their willingness to persevere.

Not all ideas are good, and not all visionaries are right. True visionaries know this, and they know that failure will always be part of the package. As we listen to those around us attempting to tackle the more complex problems of the day, perhaps we would do well to remember that even if an idea proves wrong, the people courageous enough to explore that idea might be doing something right. Everyone wants to win, but not everyone is brave enough to want to try. Where we are unable to find that courage in ourselves, let’s not forget to praise it in those who are exposing themselves to critique.

Look for the spark in the brave people around us who worry less about what others say about them, and worry more about overcoming constraints on what can be possible when we appropriately embrace courage. To be honest, they don’t much care what the crowd thinks, but the crowd has everything to gain by inviting themselves to the party. We have more challenges facing us today than the Progressive Republican President Roosevelt could have imagined, yet even more paths to triumph through knowledge if the most inspired creative voices are heard.

January 11, 2012 by Ken Goldstein - 8 Comments

The Real Lesson of Kodak

It is hard not to feel at least somewhat sentimental watching Kodak exit the world’s business stage in such a sad state after such a storied run. You have to feel sorry for the employees, especially those likely to lose retirement benefits after long careers of loyal service. It is also hard to feel sorry for the company, particularly its management. Kodak had the solution to its own ills and chose to submarine it. The lesson: if you don’t cannibalize your own business, count on a competitor to do it for you.

A timeline of “Kodak’s Key Moments” recently appeared in the Wall Street Journal, and what is too easily forgotten is that Kodak developed the first digital camera as early as 1975, but chose not to bring it to market for fear of cannibalizing its hugely popular film business. That’s an easy enough Monday morning quarterback call, but how many companies right now know they are on a path to their own obsolescence, have a pretty good idea what the long-term answer to their ills may be, but are ceding alternative paths to their competitors for fear of short-term pain or possibly looking stupid? The answer: more than you think.

In a subsequent article entitled Avoiding Innovation’s Terrible Toll, the Journal further noted that in a study of more than six million firms, only a tiny fraction made it to the ripe old age of 40. The authors of that report, Charles I. Stubbart and Michael B. Knight, reflect that “…despite their size, their vast financial and human resources, average large firms do not ‘live’ as long as ordinary Americans.” We have just seen this of late with the beloved Borders Books, and now we are watching Barnes and Noble try to pull off a comeback around its initiatives with Nook. Other companies like Apple, Johnson & Johnson, IBM, and General Electric have steered their ships across longer journeys. It is possible to go the distance, but it requires an openness to change that is so uncommon in business, you almost have to shake people physically to get them to see how to save themselves. Generally speaking, corporate people don’t like to be shaken, even if it’s good for them.

Creative destruction as most commonly defined by Joseph Schumpeter is real and unavoidable. It is also reasonably easy to argue that despite the pain it causes in transition, it is a positive force of social evolution that drives us forward and replaces inefficient procedures with new technology, updated methodology, and even new financial opportunities for investment and return. My dear friend Kermet Apio, a wonderfully successful standup comedian, captures the essence of Creative Destruction in a 90 second bit where he compares the joy and simplicity today of clicking on a song you might want to hear versus trying to find it on a cassette tape, which might take you so long you’d almost certainly abandon the task unfinished, or worse, try using your pinkie on the internal reels to queue up the precise starting spot. There’s a touch of nostalgia here, and we do find ourselves laughing very hard at what was our norm not so long ago. Click on the link above to see how Kermet tells the tale, the chuckle makes the point.

But no one is laughing at Kodak’s headquarters in Rochester, and no one should be. Kodak had the first digital camera in 1975, and while admittedly neither they nor anyone else knew what to make of this at the time, they had a much more important mandate on their mind: Protect Film. Kodachrome was not only iconic, it was hugely profitable. So was motion picture film processing. So were all their other traditional film developing technologies, not to mention the sale of retail supplies, equipment repairs, and patent licensing. Kodak was a beloved company and a global brand that made the same wrong decision so many other short-life companies make—they worried too much about cannibalism, and not enough about what happens if they don’t cannibalize their own markets.

It doesn’t get any easier to understand than this—if you don’t cannibalize your own markets, someone will do it for you. The choice is that simple: do it to yourself for your own good, or be the victim of outside attack. No form of technology is forever, and any trend you’re surfing is going to break flat on the beach. In Kermet’s bit, he talks about the Sony Walkman. Everyone had one. It was great. Then came the CD, Sony had a piece of that technology, so far so good. Then came Apple with the iPod, not the inventor of portable digital music playback, but the “perfector.” By the time Sony responded, they were on defense instead of offense. Too late. The cannibal is here, it came from elsewhere and did what you feared it would. You knew it would happen, you couldn’t stop it, but you could have been it. That’s the choice. Not will it come, but from where will it come.

That is the real lesson of Kodak: no one can stop the march of innovation because it is inconvenient or upsetting. No company can duck cannibalism by refusing to acknowledge that current markets have to be sacrificed for new markets to be built. If you’re young and just getting into business, get used to this, and get used to your bosses telling you all the reasons why they have to protect what you have today, that the hit to earnings to attack your own hugely successful lines of business with nascent replacement ventures is just too painful. If you’ve been doing this a few decades, remember back on all those long and awful bureaucratic meetings where you wished someone would have pounded the table and screamed, “To Hell with cannibalism, we’re doing this—keep the cannibal in the family!” There were meetings where that happened. Those are the companies with the 100 year brands.

If you are at CES this week wandering the endless aisles of new stuff and you see something that could eat your lunch, ask yourself, why didn’t we think of that? And if we did, would we have had the courage to launch it? Let’s hope this lesson gets easier to recite so we don’t see loyal employees lose their benefits because political correctness forced a gag order or management failed to act when time was on their side. Manage the product life cycle, but don’t be afraid to leave a little money on the table. Get the new products out there before someone does it for you. The real money is in longevity, which means innovation, which means playing offense against yourself.